DETECTIVE

H. L. Goodall, Jr. (1989). Casing a Promised Land: 

                                        The Autobiography of an Organizational 

                                        Detective as Cultural Ethnographer.

Goodall was a professor of communication who believed in getting out of the office and into the field to discover principles of communication and life. This is the first of a triology of books he wrote on cultural ethnography which later became the field of autoethnography championed by Carol Ellis and Art Bochner in the field of Communication.

Some of the best parts:

Communication researchers need to be like detectives, looking for clues, going undercover, finding key informants, getting out of the office and into the field where they can hear stories.

in the system of life, EVERYTHING COUNTS, thus the ethnographer needs to attend to details, looking for the larger scene and the specific action.

Write for truth and beauty, write based on your personal experience of life, write in a way that  is accessible for people to read and use.

When we want to know something, let's get out into the world where the action is, and LISTEN like a detective, examining clues within the scene of a system of moving parts, paying attention to details, discovering stories from multiple viewpoints about the phenomenon of interest.