Honoring Linda Putnam

It is not surprising that in order for Management Communication Quarterly to honor Linda Putnam a new award was created—the Lifetime Achievement Award. It needed to be an inaugural award . . . she already has been given all the others!

Indeed, Linda’s remarkable career has been recognized not only by receiving the highest scholarly distinctions of our two largest disciplinary associations, ICA Fellow and NCA Distinguished Scholar, but in the last 2 years alone she has received the 2010 Presidential Citation Award from the National Communication Association, for significant service to the profession, the International Association for Conflict Management’s 2010 Lifetime Achievement Award and, in 2011, the Distinguished Service Award from the Academy of Management. And such recognition is not new. As early as 1991 Linda received the Andersch Award for Outstanding Contribution to Communication, from Ohio University.

I am pleased to be given the opportunity to celebrate Linda’s contributions to the field of Communication, to Management Communication Quarterly, and Management and Organization studies in general. Each of the authors before me has known Linda for a long time, they have provided insightful analyses of her work, and each has, in his or her own way, answered the question, “Why have Linda Putnam’s contributions been so important to the Communication discipline?” In the spirit of Linda’s work, her collaborative nature, and her theoretical richness, I will integrate the diverse voices of this forum in this final essay, and elaborate Linda’s contributions, grounding my response in a communicative perspective on which we have worked for the past 20 years.

My connection to Linda began in 1978 when I was a graduate student at Purdue University studying interpersonal communication and she was an assistant professor studying small group communication. She was also in charge of the basic speech course that enrolled approximately 3,000 students per semester (talk about someone willing to do what needs to be done when no one else wants to do it)! But the answer to the question, “What is so special about Linda Putnam’s contributions?” is not that Linda is always willing to do whatever is needed (which she continues to do), nor is it how prolific she is (although 10 edited books and more than 120 articles and book chapters is quite impressive). It isn’t the official positions she has occupied (although being chair of two departments and president of 3 different international associations is highly unusual), nor is the answer the number of outstanding publication (6) or top paper (10) awards. Neither the number of editorial boards she has served on (26), the special issues she has edited (7), the department, university, or association committees she has chaired or served on (too many to count), the dozens of keynote and featured talks she has given around the world or even the number of outstanding students whom she mentored as chair of their dissertations and long after (17) capture the enormous contributions Linda has made.

No, what has made Linda’s career achievements so important to the field of Communication is the way she has personally built connections, enabling new and diverse voices to enter previously closed conversations, to embrace the multiple dualities and contradictions embedded in academic institutional structures, establishing legitimacy of organizational communication through collaboration and sheer determination. Linda is a bona fide champion of our discipline. If we look closely at the tributes of Patrice, Boris, Gail, and Dennis, we find two sets of descriptors, paralleling what she and I described as the characteristics of bona fide groups (see Putnam & Stohl, 1990). The first set of descriptors highlights stable but permeable boundaries: “a chief ambassador,” “ a broker of interdisciplinary connections,” “a shifter of the conceptual and geographical boundaries of the field,” and “an epistemological polyglot who moves easily among different academic communities, making friends and connections along the way.” The second set of descriptors, “set new research agendas,” “crafted a distinctive lens,”“constructed a strong organizational narrative care for detail without losing the bigger picture of our field”, and “is a teacher in a lineage,” embed Organizational Communication in the larger context of Management and Organization studies. Linda has always recognized and acted upon the idea that our legitimacy as a discipline is tied to the degree to which there is interdependence with the larger context. Linda has helped construct the field of Organizational Communication through negotiating areas of jurisdiction and autonomy, building semantic connections with Management and Organization scholars, playing multiple roles across various disciplines, and more than virtually any other organizational communication scholar, has embedded a communicative perspective within the larger academic context.

Indeed, it is Linda’s ability to make boundaries, that were heretofore rigid and almost impenetrable, permeable and by doing so changing the context in which our field operates that is remarkable. She truly embodies the spirit of the bona fide group’s perspective: As we wrote in 1990,

[I]f boundaries are too rigidly defined, the group feeds on its own anxieties and fails to adapt to its environment. On the other hand, if the boundaries are too porous, the group can become dominated by outside groups and their uniqueness wither. (Putnam & Stohl, 1990, p. 257)

Linda has maintained this delicate balance in all her own empirical work, her editorial work, and in her masterful reviews of literature. She has expanded our disciplinary boundaries while simultaneously drawing distinctions between communication and other types of organizational studies, thereby strengthening the identity of organizational communication, bringing unity to our diversity.

And how has she done this? It turns out that Linda herself has shared with us the blueprint for understanding her career and the way she has made a bona fide difference. In her 2000 presidential address, delivered at ICA’s 50th anniversary conference in Acapulco, Mexico and published in the Journal of Communication in 2001, Linda took stock of the our discipline, reviewed its fermentation, fragmentation, and legitimation and developed guidelines for the discipline to come together. As she stated, it is important for

the field to take inventory of multiple and shifting voices in reviews and critiques of the literature, to connect with each other through exploring shifting concepts and theories, and to engage in joint actions in ways that embrace and preserve differences. (p. 38)

Linda has done all these things. Whether it was taking inventory and highlighting emerging voices in the field as she did in Putnam and Pacanowsky (1983) and, more recently, Putnam and Nicotera (2009), connecting scholars at the intersections of Management and Organization and Communication studies (as she did in the Handbooks of Organizational Communication, 1987, 2001, and The Sage Handbook of Organizational Discourse Studies, 2004), engaging patriarchal practices with feminist voices (Putnam & Fairhurst, 1985), unbounding rational discourses to embrace emotionality (Mumby & Putnam, 1992), making paradox seems logical (Putnam, 1986; Poole & Putnam, 2008), or highlighting the ways metaphors of organization are constituted through communication (Putnam, 1998a, 1998b; Putnam & Boys, 2006; Putnam, Phillips, & Chapman, 1996, Linda’s ability to embody multiple voices and work closely with people unlike herself, scholars who take a stance or a position from which to speak that is different from hers, and include them is remarkable. And she does so seamlessly, moving across boundaries speaking “others’” languages at the same time that she speaks “ours.”

It is fitting that Linda gave her presidential speech in Acapulco. She was instrumental in creating an infrastructure to increase the international reach of the International Communication Association. She brought Organizational Communication to many parts of the world though her editorial work, her talks at universities around the world, her mentoring of graduate students, and her writings. Her article in MCQ on the history of organizational communication in Brazil is the most recent example of Linda building bridges and framing relationships.

Linda Putnam is truly a bona fide scholar championing our field to others while strengthening our identity. Her lifetime achievements are a chronology of our field’s achievements. Thank you, Linda.