[3] Her work has achieved awards in several fields, including the Alpha Kappa Psi Award for Distinguished Publication in Business Communication (three times); Outstanding Researcher in Business Communication, the Association for Business Communication; Waldo Gifford Leland Prize of the Society of American Archivists; the Harold F. Williamson, Sr. Prize for Mid-Career Achievement in Business History; Lifetime Service Award from the Organizational Communication and Information Systems Division of the Academy of Management; and numerous best paper awards.
In the 1980 she started her academic career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, where she founded the Managerial Communication Unit.
"[4] Yates has authored and co-authored numerous publications including both monographs in business history and articles in management and communication journals.
Her most recent book, co-authored with her husband Craig N. Murphy, Engineering Rules: Global Standard Setting since 1880 (2019) studies the rise and important role of private, voluntary standard setting in the global economy.
Her collaborations with MIT colleague Wanda Orlikowski in the 1990s and after introduced rhetorical analysis of genre within a frame of structuration theory to organizational studies.