I suggest that to require an ethnographer to stand by is not only to repress their identity as a moral person, with beliefs about life that are as valid as those of the participants, but may also crucially ignore the power balances involved in the situation. The circumstances when ethnographers may want to intervene tend to be those which are disempowering to the individuals in the situation, and particularly to those lower down the organisational hierarchy. In the first two cases, the ethnographer, if they are in the situation in the role of outside consultant, may well have considerable power to convince management of the need for change. This is a more positive use of their status mentioned above. This intervention may seem an impossible prospect, and a matter of persuading people to do something they don't want to.
Managers seem most unlikely to want to be changed, after all.
While these are in many cases more to do with hype than actual empowerment, that the words are used so widely suggests that they may have more possibility for acceptance than might at first seem apparent to those used to decades of machine-like organisations following the cues of Taylor and Ford. Finally, there is a mighty need to positively act to emancipate individuals because of the strong disempowering drives found in many methodologies for experimentation or for software engineering. Most were originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s, for use in the military or in the data processing departments of massive, hierarchically structured, corporations. So this emancipatory approach is needed to act as a counterweight. So taking a moral stance is needed for ethnographers - sitting by and watching is not enough.