Linda L. Putnam is a Distinguished Research Professor and Emerita Professor who joined the Department of Communication at Santa Barbara in 2007. Before coming to UCSB, she served as a Regent’s Professor and as the George T. and Gladys H. Abell Professor of Communication at Texas A&M University. At UCSB, she held the position of Department Chair from 2010-2013. She received her Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Minnesota in 1977 and her M.A. from the University of Wisconsin in 1968.
Her research focuses on organizational paradoxes and contradictions, negotiation and conflict management in organizations and organizational discourse studies. She has conducted studies on teachers’ negotiation, multiparty environmental disputes, negotiation teams, and labor conflicts, including the 2007-2008 Writers Guild Strike. Her discourse studies focus heavily on tensions and contradictions, especially in organizational work-life issues, workplaces, and hybrid work.
Dr. Putnam is a Fellow of the International Communication Association (ICA), a Distinguished Scholar of the National Communication Association (NCA), a Fellow of the International Association for Conflict Management (IACM), and a Fellow of the Academy of Management Association (AoM). She holds Honorary Doctorate Degrees from the School of Science in Economics and Business at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland and from the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Montreal in Canada.
In 2015, she received the UCSB Faculty Distinguished Research Lecturer for extraordinary achievements in research and scholarly work. She has also received Lifetime Achievement Awards from IACM (2011), Management Communication Quarterly for contributions that shaped the field of organizational communication (2012), and the ICA Steven H. Chaffee Career Productivity Award (2005). In 1993, she received the NCA Charles H. Woolbert Award for Original and Innovative Research and she is a two-time recipient of the ICA Best Article Award (2005, 2009). Seven of her books and articles have also received top awards from the Organizational Communication Divisions of NCA and ICA, including the 2024 NCA Outstanding Monograph Award for her co-authored book on Performing Organizational Paradoxes (with Gail T. Fairhurst).
To fund her research, she has received grants from the National Science Foundation, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. She has presented over 120 invited keynote addresses, plenary speaker, and distinguished lectures throughout the US and in Brazil, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Mexico, Germany, the Netherlands, Korea, Portugal, New Zealand, and Australia.
In addition to her research, Dr. Putnam has received a number of service and mentorship awards, including the 2012 NCA Samuel L. Becker Distinguished Service Award, the 2011 AoM Distinguished Service Award for contributions to the discipline at large, and the 2018 ICA B. Aubrey Fisher Mentorship Award. She is a past president of three professional societies--the International Communication Association, the International Association for Conflict Management, and the Council of Communication Associations. She was elected an at-large member of the AoM Board of Governors and has served as the Chair of the Organizational Communication Divisions of NCA and ICA and the Conflict Management Division of AoM. Her professional service has also included appointments as Associate Editor of Human Relations (2001-2006) and Organization (2001-2007), co-editorship of four handbooks and nine special issues of journals.
Ph.D. (1977). University of Minnesota, Speech Communication