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Tom Burns (sociologist)
Tom Burns FBA (16 January 1913 – 20 June 2001) was an English sociologist, author and founder of the Sociology department at Edinburgh University.
Burns was born on 16 January 1913 in Bethnal Green, East London. He attended Hague Street LCC elementary school and Parmiter's Foundation School before reading English Literature at Bristol University.
A Fellow of the British Academy, Tom Burns was Professor of Sociology at Edinburgh University from 1965 to 1981, and also taught at Harvard and Columbia.
He is best known for his studies of the organization of the BBC, local government, the electronics industry and the National Health Service. He also wrote on his experiences as a non-combatant prisoner of war in Germany during the Second World War.
His early interests were in urban sociology, and he worked with the West Midland Group on Post-War Reconstruction and Planning. While he was at Edinburgh his particular concern was with studies of different types of organization and their effects on communication patterns and on the activities of managers. He has also explored the relevance of different forms of organization to changing conditions—especially to the impact of technical innovation.
In collaboration with psychologist George Macpherson Stalker, Burns has studied the attempt to introduce electronics development work into traditional Scottish firms, with a view to their entering this modern and rapidly expanding industry as the markets for their own well-established products diminished. This resulted in the 1961 book, "The Management of Innovation."
He coined the terms mechanistic organization and organismic, or organic, organization.
He expressed his approach to research and expressed in the preface to the second edition of The Management of Innovation: "by perceiving behaviour as a medium of constant interplay and mutual redefinition of individual identities and social institutions ... it is possible to begin to grasp the nature of changes, developments and historical processes through which we move and which we help to create." In 1964, he founded the Sociology department at University of Edinburgh.
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Tom Burns (sociologist)
Tom Burns FBA (16 January 1913 – 20 June 2001) was an English sociologist, author and founder of the Sociology department at Edinburgh University.
Burns was born on 16 January 1913 in Bethnal Green, East London. He attended Hague Street LCC elementary school and Parmiter's Foundation School before reading English Literature at Bristol University.
A Fellow of the British Academy, Tom Burns was Professor of Sociology at Edinburgh University from 1965 to 1981, and also taught at Harvard and Columbia.
He is best known for his studies of the organization of the BBC, local government, the electronics industry and the National Health Service. He also wrote on his experiences as a non-combatant prisoner of war in Germany during the Second World War.
His early interests were in urban sociology, and he worked with the West Midland Group on Post-War Reconstruction and Planning. While he was at Edinburgh his particular concern was with studies of different types of organization and their effects on communication patterns and on the activities of managers. He has also explored the relevance of different forms of organization to changing conditions—especially to the impact of technical innovation.
In collaboration with psychologist George Macpherson Stalker, Burns has studied the attempt to introduce electronics development work into traditional Scottish firms, with a view to their entering this modern and rapidly expanding industry as the markets for their own well-established products diminished. This resulted in the 1961 book, "The Management of Innovation."
He coined the terms mechanistic organization and organismic, or organic, organization.
He expressed his approach to research and expressed in the preface to the second edition of The Management of Innovation: "by perceiving behaviour as a medium of constant interplay and mutual redefinition of individual identities and social institutions ... it is possible to begin to grasp the nature of changes, developments and historical processes through which we move and which we help to create." In 1964, he founded the Sociology department at University of Edinburgh.