Architects of Communication Scholarship

Ellen Wartella 0:02
ICA presents

Hello. I'm Ellen Wartella. And welcome to this episode of the Architects of Communication Scholarship podcast series, a production of the ICA Podcast Network. Today, our architect is Linda Putnam. Linda Putnam is a distinguished research professor emeritus in the Department of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research interests include paradoxes and contradictions, negotiation, organizational conflict, and organization discourse analysis. She is the co-editor of 13 books and author of over 200 articles and book chapters. She is a distinguished scholar of the National Communication Association, a fellow of the International Communication Association, the recipient of Lifetime Achievement awards from the International Association for Conflict Management, and Management Communication Quarterly, and the recipient of honorary doctorates from the University of Montreal and Canada and Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland. Today, Linda is in conversation with Patrice Buzzanell who is a professor at the University of South Florida. And here is Patrice.

Patrice Buzzanell 1:15
So Hello, I am Patrice Buzzanell. And I am just so absolutely delighted to be able to do this interview. I'm excited to hear what you've been doing, Linda, and also to learn more about your background. Why don't we just go ahead and start with just personal history, you know, where you went to school, you know how you ended up in communication and in organizational communication.

Linda Putnam 1:43
Thank you Patrice, very much. My background goes to a kid growing up in a small town in Oklahoma. And moving to Texas when I was in high school. So I grew up on those kind of roots. And I grew up in the 50s and the 60s. I went to college at a small liberal arts school, Hardin-Simmons University in Texas. I majored in English and in speech communication. In high school, I had worked on the high school newspaper, I was actually the news editor for the high school newspaper. And so I thought, "hey, communications fun, I could do some work in media, I could do work in theater". I also did some theater in high school. So when I was at Hardin-Simmons, I double majored and I enjoyed English, I enjoyed a lot of the analysis of poems and literature and so forth. But I found communication came alive. And I really liked it. And so I enjoyed, back then, it was heavily what we call speech communication. And I did a lot of debate, I was in competition and oral interpretation and persuasion and all those kinds of things. And I took a lot of classes, and back then they didn't have a lot of classes, in interpersonal and organizational. But I took classes in media. And I took classes, of course in public speaking and rhetoric, which was very big at the time. So I came into the field kind of serendipitously, many of us are like that, where I said, "Okay, which one of these am I going to pursue more?" and I said, "I really like communication. And I think I'm going to put my emphasis in that area." And I went off to the University of Wisconsin. And I'll tell you how I got there when we talk about our mentors. But I was going to study persuasion, and rhetoric at the University of Wisconsin in the midst of the Vietnam War. It was a pretty active place in the midst of the Vietnam War. I was a TA there and had not even been teaching in the classroom very long before some group of people came in the room, turned the trashcan upside down on my desk and yelled, "We're on strike!" And so I'm trying to figure out, how does this teacher handle this in the midst of it and of course, lots of demonstrations and everything. A very active kind of environment for looking at rhetoric and public persuasion for sure. So that was my background in terms. I know, as I came through Hardin-Simmons, I was really interested in group decision making and discussion. So that influenced some of the ways I went in the field of communication when I decided to begin to settle down and study more completely in that area.

Patrice Buzzanell 4:31
And you've already alluded to my next question, which is mentors, and I'm curious early on what, who your mentors would be or what, I think many of us had non-human mentoring as well. And then moving up through as you got your PhD and then afterwards.

Linda Putnam 4:51
My mentor as an undergrad, and I will be forever indebted and thankful to her is Emogene Emory and she was a woman who came into speech communication with an interest in parliamentary procedure, if you believe. She was quite the, she was called in in every Chamber of Commerce meeting and rotary meeting and everything to be the parliamentarian. So she was an active person in the community, active in teaching. She became department chair. And during the time I worked with her, I took several classes from her and I worked with her, she, she hired me as her grader. And then she hired me to help her as a department assistant, as a student worker in the department. So I really got to kind of see the department in the field a little bit from her perspective. And she was very influential in me going to graduate school, she kept saying, "You need to move on. I know, women don't usually do this. They usually just go teach in public schools, but you need to move on." So I will give her a lot of credit. And there was a guy by the name of James Cleary, who came to campus to visit because he was very big in parliamentary procedure, and he knew Miss Emory. And so he would come to visit. And he was from the University of Wisconsin. And he said, "You are interested in rhetoric and persuasion and these kinds of things in this is what we do here. So we would like you to apply." So I did. So that little kid from Texas, goes trekking up to Wisconsin, in the midst of the Vietnam War.

That's how I got there. So, I worked at the University of Wisconsin for a year, Lloyd Bitser was my advisor, and had some influence on me there. I decided I didn't like rhetoric all that much, but I didn't know what to do. So, he and several others there, sponsored me to get a job at the University of Massachusetts as an instructor because they did not have a Ph. D program yet. So, after my master's program, I went to the University of Massachusetts. And I worked there just TAing. And one of my mentors there was Jane Blankenship. And she's a former president of NCA, and a very big field leader in the field, particularly in social movements work and rhetoric, and so forth. And she just took me under wing, and I still wasn't quite sure what I was going to do and where I was going. And I didn't want to keep on the same path. And she said, "Linda, you know, this new area, interpersonal communication, and something called group communication, you're just a natural for this, you really ought to go for your PhD in that area." And Ernest Bormann at the University of Minnesota was a big group communication scholar. And so I applied there. And so I was accepted. And so he became my mentor at the University of Minnesota, took me under wing, even though I didn't, I wasn't quite the rhetorician that many of his advisees were, I was a group scholar. And he liked that part. And actually, my first research project was with him and another woman, when we studied power, sex and authority, male response to female leadership. Studying fantasy themes in a simulated organization, he was very big on simulated organizations. And he, of course, shaped a little of my interpretive work as I moved into organizational communication. And another mentor that I had, there was David Smith. And he eventually went into health communication, just a whole whole different area than I'm in. But he taught me in conflict and negotiation. He taught me in a negotiation course on game theory, traditional models, a lot of work on letting people talk or not letting people talk, which I kept saying, "This is the most naive view of communication. Who are these bargaining negotiation scholars? And why did they think of communication in such narrow ways?" So that kind of work. And he kept saying, "Well, you got to push that you ought to really go look at what's the role of communication has been in negotiation." So one of my first publications when I went to Purdue, was on the role of communication and bargaining. So both of those were, were very influential to me, when I was at University of Minnesota and moving through my doctoral program.

Patrice Buzzanell 9:25
Okay, this is just fascinating, because I knew some of the story, but I certainly didn't know the rest. And I remember reading the fantasy theme analysis in the grad class at Purdue University, and I believe that was the first grad class that you taught in organizational communication, because you didn't start there. Or maybe you started there as an org comm scholar, but what's, what's the story there because you were hired as interpersonal I think?

Linda Putnam 9:57
I was hired as interpersonal and group. Now, I was always interested in org and David Smith and George Shapiro, at University of Minnesota had both had an impact on me. And I was interested in org. But when I got hired at Purdue, the job ad was interpersonal. And I had a pretty good background in that from Minnesota, and org was really just moving into the scene. So when I got to Purdue, I taught, the initial classes I taught were undergraduate classes, in group and interpersonal communication. The first graduate level class I taught was interpersonal communication, which was kind of a theories of interpersonal communication, which I knew and enjoyed and worked with. And then as I, of course, Charles Redding is kind of another mentor to me as he is to you. Charles Redding and I became very good friends and colleagues working together. And he said, "Linda, I've always wanted a survey course, in org comm, and I'm too attached to my graduate seminar. And how about if you develop a survey course in organizational communication, and I'd like you to teach it." And I said, "Oh, I'd love it." So that's what happened, is I began developing the survey course there. And that was a course that had not been taught before. And then Charles and I kind of did tandem with that. And then I was working in negotiation and bargaining. So I was offering some courses in that area. So we developed a kind of high-compatible inner relationship and the way that I began moving into organizational communication.

Patrice Buzzanell 11:33
So we've been reflecting back on your background, certainly, mentors, influencers. But what do you think now are some of the big intellectual questions for communication scholars, maybe organizational communication, but really communication in general, that we need to address in the next decade?

Linda Putnam 11:56
Oh, very good. I think we're all trying to now get at grand challenges, I think we're all struggling and that includes, I think scholars outside our field as well in our field. But, that all of the questions we're looking at, tie back to some big grand challenges. Whether they're diversity and equity, whether they're pollution and environmental and sustainability, whether they're at large-scale global, local conflicts and they're in a relationship. And I think that the challenge for all of us is, we've thought in big context arenas, like an organization and an organization in society or something like that. But we've never thought in kind of, I think, grand challenge, large-scale arenas, and building knowledge around that. Risk factors that are connected to organizations and interfaces that are far more inter-organizational, and interdisciplinary. So, I think that the field as a whole has got to kind of advance itself a little more in that direction, and begin to try to figure out that puzzle, which is no simple one, and there are many grand challenges out there to face. So I think that's one. I think that we're all dealing with technology and its influence and big data, and what we do with big data and how we use big data in different kinds of ways. And so I think the field of communication is standing on the precipice. There's no other field better prepared in my mind, to try to get at kind of the some of the grand challenges around technology, and some of the ways that we can begin to address some of those. And now realizing that digital communication is largely not just technology, it's, you know, large societal issues. And we've done a great job of introducing that from the moment we looked at dating, and digital dating and interpersonal arenas, all the way up to the use of AI, artificial intelligence and organizations and where it's going in our society and how it's going to drive different ways that humans and machines interface and what we do together and constituting issues and working through problems. We just need to continue to focus on that. And, I think that's my two that I can come off with right now.

Patrice Buzzanell 14:35
But that also, I think it's a challenge for our field, that if you are seeing greater integration, and certainly I can think of other areas where health and well being is at the forefront of the manuscripts that I'm reviewing and the conversations that are going on, you know, what does this mean then, for the way we have traditionally organized our field, which has been a context based organizational structure that hasn't always enabled us to bring across some of the findings, the methods, the theories, and so on, that could benefit a different area. I mean, because we are still despite efforts siloed.

Linda Putnam 15:22
Excellent, just excellent question. And I've thought about this from time to time, because, first of all, I've studied framing and reframing, which is studied all over our field. Media scholars are big in it, and we're all different in how we do it. Interpersonal scholars have used and I have kind of thought about why are we not kind of communicating with each other, to try to rethink what this concept is, and how communication comes to bear in constituting the concept and what's going on in different arenas. But I think we need to, honestly treat communication, and find a way to almost make us come together in interdisciplinary, like interdisciplinary ways. So what I see is when we look at universities, and we look at how did new departments get created, they often come out of institute's interdisciplinary projects. I mean, genetics, and biology, and physics all come together in a way they've never seen each other before, out of some kind of institute around similar problems. And I think our field needs to kind of do this, we need to think about what would be the the little mini-institute in a department or the mini, kind of grant project or kind of large scale national, importance project that pulls us together, and creates kind of a new, new way of thinking about who we are. And in some ways you just brought it up. If we keep the silos-model going, I think we're going to, we're not going to advance as a field. We're going to miss the opportunities to engage in the kinds of projects and the kinds of ways we, with our unique lenses, can come together to look at some of the grand challenges and problems and so forth. So, I think that would be my, my recommendation about trying to break those silos, is maybe see us as a little more like interdisciplinary researchers from different contexts or different arenas, and really, find a way to get that support, and I don't mean just grants, but that's one opportunity. But find a way to get that nourished in the field and rewarded.

Patrice Buzzanell 17:45
So this podcast series, as you know, is titled Architects of Communication Scholarship. So, what would you say that you have built?

Linda Putnam 17:58
Well, I, I think I came into org comm. At a time when it was bifurcated in particular kinds of ways. It was an ICA audit studies, it was studies of leadership and managerial communication. You know, there are pockets of other things that people were studying. And I really believe I'm one of many, not alone in any way, as an architect who has redefined what organizational communication is, and what it scholarship can be. A little bit with the interpretive approach, certainly, as a scholar trying to bring, as you point out, discourse and language and rhetorical kinds of ways that we begin to look at social science, to try to kind of be an architect that shapes that kind of arena too. So, I think in that way, I've done that and probably a little more, a little of the architect in conflict and negotiation, as person who joined with other communication scholars, although probably fewer than an organization, to reconstruct the kind of models and ways and the phenomena that we begin to look at when we look at negotiation and conflict is constituted in communication. And certainly there are many interpersonal scholars right now, I think, by that lens and have embellished that lens in so many ways. I'm one of the players who've probably brought that more into the organizational arena. So, as an architect who has brought that lens and been able to build that as a theory, and as a way of understanding, and a way of kind of seeing the phenomena differently.

Patrice Buzzanell 19:53
I would say that this really epitomizes your work and what you have done for our field. Because I've benefited from this as a student and throughout my career, that there are these moments, serendipitous, totally unplanned, and totally not what we're doing in our field yet. And you have been the force that has enabled us to take these generative, spontaneous moments, and help integrate and create something that's new and beneficial. Again, not just for us as communication scholars, or one little niche in communication, but for interdisciplinary scholarship and practical applications. And I would say that that's part of your architecture, is being able to create that space where people can have the confidence and know that they can be innovative and find their way in, in intellectual traditions and beyond. So thank you.

Linda Putnam 21:05
Thank you, Patrice. Marvelous interview, appreciate you so much.

Patrice Buzzanell 21:09
You are welcome.

Ellen Wartella 21:13
This episode of Architects of Communication Scholarship podcast series is presented by the International Communication Association Podcast Network, and is sponsored by the School of Communication at Hong Kong Baptist University. Our producer is Daniel Christian and Jabari Clemons. Our executive producer is Aldo Diaz Caballero. Our production consultant is Nick Song. The theme music is by Humans Win. For more information about our participants on this episode, as well as our sponsor, be sure to check the episode description. Thanks for listening.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai