Lots of "why", lack of "how"

I am curious about something I had noticed and then Harper put into nice words: why is it that we find a lot of texts and papers defending the usefulness of ethnography as a method for collecting information about the context where activity is performed, but very very rarely we find a paper that actually describes HOW the ethnographic observation is done.

Maybe is it because I am only in the beginning of my reading and still didn't find much about it.

Harper's explanation is actually very convincing: he argues that by mid-1980's organizations were tired of being fooled by vendors, who promised a lot of things that technology at that stage couldn't do. So these companies started to make up their own way of finding out WHAT exactly workers need in these terms to improve their performance.

And that is, for example, when Participatory Design comes in. And also, that is when mangers realize that having an anthropologist to take a look at their company and help them in the task could be a good idea. So, basically, the first sparkle for the ethnographic approach started in the commercial world, not in the academia, where the REAL anthropologists are. By no means this diminishes the work of Suchman and Lyin, quite the opposite: they were the first to show that even in ORGANIZations, things don't happen quite in a ORGANIZide and rational way.

So, managers don't really want to know how ethnographers arrived at the conclusions they arrived: they are interested in the results, punto.

I think I need to read more. Need to find HOW to ethnograph.