Linda Putnam is an American scholar and professor in the department of communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is known for her theories on organizational communication, centered on conflict management and negotiation, solutions within organizations, gender studies in organizations, and organizational space. Putnam has performed studies on instructors, multiparty environmental disputes, negotiation teams, and labor conflicts. Her discourse studies primarily are focused heavily on tensions and contradictions and also incorporate metaphors, narratives, discursive framing, and arguments. Putnam's work also focuses on the contradictions and interactions within the field of work-life issues within organizations, organizational development and work inside of open office environments.
Putnam began teaching in 1993 at Texas A&M University's department of speech communication and later became the department's head. Her courses focus on a variety of topics that include communication and conflict management, discourse analysis in organizations, and gender and organizations. In 2006 Putnam was recognized as a Regents' Professor at Texas A&M for her research and teaching. The following year Putnam took a position with the University of California Santa Barbara's communications department, where she serves as a Distinguished Research Professor Emerita.
Putnam's research focuses mainly on breaking downgroup communication through the understanding of conflict, contradictions, and negotiations inside of organizations such as the 2007-2008 Writers Guild Strike. Her more current research has taken her into "conflict framing in multiparty environmental disputes, especially in the ways that different stakeholders make sense of complex, seemingly intractable conflicts"
Expanded upon by Linda Putnam the theory of organizational development is centered on breaking down the pathways that allow and organization to form and grow. Linda Putnam looks at Organizational Development and expands the idea of Paradoxical thinking. Using a Postmodernist approach this Theory focuses on the idea that modern Organizational Development leaves holes that are created by contradictions and dialectics. Through a feminist view, it is possible to use this theory to create new avenues for discussion on gendered identities within an organization that can lead to tensions. The theory supports the idea that tackling these cultural paradoxes will allow for new identities and organizations to be created.
