Philip Marlowe: Private Ethnographer : CASING A PROMISED LAND The Autobiography of an Organizational Detective as Cultural Ethnographer <i> by H. L. Goodall Jr. (Southern Illinois University Press: $22.50; 175 pp.) </i>

It’s been a long day. All you want is a quick shot, a slow beer, and a good book. And a blonde. Or brunette. With long legs. Instead, there’s no booze because you’ve just remembered that you’re on the wagon, and the blonde is your wife, which is OK because she has long legs. As for the book, you look at the title, “Casing a Promised Land,” and ask yourself, “What is this bozo up to?” The words organizational and ethnographer catch your attention. You think about all the organizations you’ve worked for, their little enclaves and in-groups, their published rule books and their hidden agendas, their sanctions and statuses and roles, and you know you’re in for the duration.

Only the first study is written in a way resembling detective fiction, and it’s an appropriate way to begin because it situates H. L. Goodall at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and the reader in a complex community that includes the Star Wars (SDI) command, the NASA Space Camp, sundry organizations that sprang up, like sharks at a feeding frenzy, around the space agency hub, shopping malls, etc. What’s important about this way of beginning is that it involves us at a subliminal level in a subculture that bears resemblances to the several in which Americans increasingly find themselves these days, especially in “the burbs.”

Goodall takes us on a meandering stroll through five case studies, and having inveigled us into a partially objective frame of mind, we are able to enjoy vicariously some of his experiences. By including himself in his depictions, he invites us to include ourselves in his analysis. It’s an effective way of writing, one that’s frowned upon in academic circles because it supposedly compromises objectivity. But do we imagine that we can really grasp the essence of an experience unless we admit what we ourselves experience?

In one essay, Goodall describes how he went through a program at the NASA Space Camp, and he touches on a phenomenon becoming more and more common as its nuances become less and less noticed. He speaks at one point of a video world “in which thoughts are replaced with moving pictures and feelings are replaced with stereo sound tracks.” The simulation of a successful shuttle launch is followed by a group euphoria, also experienced by Goodall, and he asks himself (and us), “Is this the real simulation?” After three days of this, with the senses tuned to electronic controls that in turn respond to body movements, the world outside comes to an end, and one is absorbed, Tron-like, in a cybernetic cosmos: virtual reality.

Of course in one sense we are already there and have been since the beginning of human imagination. What are our daydreams, if not virtual reality? Don’t we already go through our lives almost entirely absorbed in reconstructing the past and preconstructing the future? We shy away from the weirdo who talks to himself on the street, and as we do so, we talk to ourselves in our heads. In fact, we talk continuously, so the difference may not be one of degree, just of manifestation.

What Goodall asks is whether the great number of our outer manifestations are not actually projections of our thoughts and feelings: pretext as subtext. The answer is obvious. Or is it? Or is it obvious only when we ask the question, but we never ask it? Goodall proposes that we could begin an organizational study by snooping around the corporate parking lot, seeing who drives what, who parks next to the boss, etc. What does it mean that only three people have brightly colored cars--all three red--in a lot entirely composed of pastel vehicles? Who are the three people with red cars, and how do they fit into the organizational structure? (Look on pages 18-20 for clues.)

What--or who--are we really studying when we take on an organization of which we ourselves are part? The reason that detective fiction suggests itself to Goodall is that good ethnography (including the informal sort of self-questioning that we ourselves might engage in) must include oneself and one’s responses. This is the method of all really great detectives: Spade, Marlowe, McGee, etc. They describe the world as it happens to them, looking for clues to their own identities as well as those that will exculpate one person and incriminate another. If I am studying the company I work for, maybe in order to find out whether I belong there, maybe I should include my revulsion at the lobby decor. I might find the clues I need in the pricking of my thumbs.

Goodall supplies an extensive bibliography that includes, amid the requisite plethora of academic citations, Raymond Chandler, Dashiel Hammet, Barry Hannah and Walker Percy, all of whom clearly have been significant influences. (I missed Don DeLillo, Milan Kundera and Stanislaw Lem.) The final chapter in this too-brief set of case studies is a response to the publisher’s insistence on a formal survey of the principles and issues that Goodall feels are central to his work. It is to his credit that he doesn’t let the publisher get away with too much of this sort of thing, managing to maintain his subversive ways right to the last page. Where he winks at you. And you smile.