Karen Myers

Karen K. Myers (Ph.D. Arizona State University) (myers@comm.ucsb.edu) is a Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a first-generation college student who graduated with a BS degree in Marketing from Arizona State University. After 12 years of owning and leading a business that researched, wrote and published organizational histories, she sold her business interests and entered graduate school at the University of New Mexico and earned an MA in Communication. She earned a PhD at Arizona State University and took her first job as an Assistant Professor at Purdue University. In 2007, she joined the Department of Communication at UC Santa Barbara. Karen Myers’ research includes membership negotiation (socialization, assimilation); vocational anticipatory socialization; the communicative constitution of organizations; emotions in the workplace, generational cohorts in the workplace, workplace flexibility; and organizational identification. She uses qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods. She is a co-author on the new book The Communicative Constitution of Organizations: The Four Flows Model (McPhee, Myers & Iverson, 2025). Her work has also appeared in Management Communication Quarterly, Human Communication Research, Journal of Applied Communication Research, Communication Monographs, Communication Yearbook, Human Relations and elsewhere. Karen is a co-founder of the Department of Communication’s Alumni Council and was the founding faculty advisor to UCSB’s Marketing Association. She was an Associate Dean in the Graduate Division and remains passionate about graduate education.