Orgnisation and Social Order, by Professor Tom BurnsProfessor Russell Keat

Tom Burns FBA - An Obituary and Appreciation

by FB; DMcC and others at the University of Edinburgh

Tom Burns who died on 20th June at the age of 88 was Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Edinburgh. He was the founding member of the Department and its first Professor from 1965 till 1981. He was educated at Hague Street, LCC Elementary School; Parmiters Foundation School and the University of Bristol. He served in the Friends Ambulance Unit between 1939 and 1945 and was a prisoner of war in Germany between 1941 and 1943. A research assistant in the West Midland Group on Post-War Reconstruction and Planning from 1945-49, he then came as a lecturer to the University of Edinburgh where he remained till his retirement in 1981. His colleagues held a conference to mark his retirement, and the ease with which a group drawn from the world's leading sociologists was assembled to pay tribute to him speaks volumes for the respect in which he was held.

Tom Burns was a sociologist of international distinction, with a remarkable sociological vision and imagination which not only made him a leader in his field but often put him so far ahead of it that his contributions were only fully recognised many years later. He was one of the first sociologists to be elected to a Fellowship of the British Academy but was far more than an outstanding sociologist. His scholarship ranged widely and embraced philosophy, literature and history as well as sociology. He was a profound thinker and an inspiration to his colleagues and students who, even if they did not manage to fully grasp his ideas, something which happened quite often, sensed that they were always original, and at the cutting edge of his subject. He was one of the first British sociologists to look beyond the United States, stressing and developing European links, and bringing current European work to the attention of a wider public. The department at Edinburgh benefited from this in many ways, not least from a steady stream of European visitors. From the first he emphasised the importance of teaching students not just about society, but about the methodologies and skills required to study it. This insistence pre-dated by at least a decade, concerns which surfaced in British sociology about relatively poor methodological training, especially in quantitative methods, and which reverberate to this day. The breadth of his interests, his foresight and originality can readily be seen in his book of essays, Description, explanation and understanding : selected writings, 1944-1980, published by Edinburgh University Press in 1995.

His major contributions were to the sociology of organisations and bureaucracy. His first book The Management of Innovation (1961 with G.M.Stalker) remains a landmark study. It showed how innovative organisations depended on informal, often horizontal linkages which did not figure in the formal structures and organisation charts of hierarchical, vertically organised firms, and indeed were frequently discouraged to their long term detriment. These insights have affected organisation theory ever since, sometimes consciously, sometimes as half conscious re-inventions of a wheel. The BBC: Public Institution and Private World (1977), based on 300 interviews he carried out single handed with BBC staff, was the outcome of two extended periods of fieldwork within the BBC first in the early 1960s and again in 1973, and a lengthy struggle to persuade that institution to allow an account to be published. It was typical of Tom Burns' determination and persuasive skills that he eventually overcame the difficulties placed in his path. His profound grasp of the working of organisations was valued outside the academic world. He carried out a study of and consultancy with a large international oil company, which accepted and put into practice many of his recommendations. This practical engagement with the world of industry and commerce was much less common at that time. In this regard too Tom Burns was ahead of the game.

He believed strongly that 'society' was much more interesting than 'sociology', and that doing empirical sociology was much more important - and difficult - than theory-building for its own sake. His inaugural lecture in 1965 (Sociological Explanation') remains a touchstone of what sociology is for, and how it is to be done. A key passage which could with benefit be engraved on the hearts of all sociologists and which marked the subsequent work of many of his colleagues runs:

"The purpose of sociology is to achieve an understanding of social behaviour and social institutions which is different from that current among the people through whose conduct the institutions exist; an understanding which is not simply different but better. The practice of sociology is criticism. It exists to criticise claims about the value of achievement and to question assumptions about the meaning of conduct. It is the business of sociologists to conduct a critical debate with the public about its equipment of social institutions."

Tom Burns was one of those relatively rare people who not only study organisations and institutions but know how to build them. He created a department at the University of Edinburgh which more than 35 years later still to some extent reflects his skill in choosing colleagues with strong talents and skills across the board. He laid the foundation for the department's excellence, which is reflected in its high grades in the Research Assessment Exercises and Teaching Quality Assessments of recent years. Paradoxically, one can be fairly sure that he would have been the first to condemn these developments as distorting of research effort and scholarship, and immensely consuming of time which could be better spent actually doing sociology. Echoes of his ability to forge a working department whose members identified strongly with it and often placed its interests above their own can still be detected to this day. This is partly because many of his colleagues chose, as he had done between 1949 and 1981, to make their entire careers at the University of Edinburgh - eight of them retiring with or still holding personal or established chairs, sometimes outwith the department and in one case in a different discipline, Economic and Social History. Others, who did escape from the department, hold major chairs in other Universities in Britain, Canada, the European University Institute and in the United States.

He was an unusual Head of Department, claiming not to be a great administrator, thus forcing younger colleagues to take on responsibilities beyond their years and experience, with well-justified suspicions that his claimed inabilities were more than a little disingenuous. This policy lead to a situation many years later, when in a time of severe financial pressure, a Dean justified not immediately filling the established chair which Burns himself had vacated, on the grounds that there were at least five or six people who could easily run the department. He regularly put forward his colleagues for committees and other roles within the University and outside it, for instance in the British Sociological Association, and encouraged them to be active citizens in the University and the sociological discipline. He was also, in the best sense, a remarkable manipulator of people. During the late 1960s when sociology departments were often riven with discontent, and with younger staff at the throats of their senior colleagues pressing for changes, Edinburgh was an exception to this general rule. It only dawned on his colleagues much later that Tom Burns leadership style might have been deliberately designed to this end. He was continually arguing persuasively for change - in syllabuses, in methods of teaching, assessment and examining, in departmental organisation - so that the prevailing ethos was turned upside down with younger colleagues striving to restrain their Head of Department from his wilder schemes.

Tom Burns continual ability to spark off untold numbers of good ideas could have its down side. It led sometimes to the confusion of his luckless postgraduate students who would go in for supervision clutching one do-able idea and come out with six different ones, some marvellous and far better than the original, some quite impracticable. This often left the rest of his dept to pick up the pieces and steer students through to their thesis. Along with his many successes and achievements, he himself was prone to generate and start more work than he ever finished, leading on one memorable occasion to his being black-listed by the Social Sciences Research Council as it then was. He would not have been happy working in the environment of the last decade with its emphasis on measurable outputs of 'product'; he knew from his professional work that the impact of really innovative research is not easily tracked, especially in the short term, and would probably have expressed his opinion robustly and with the contempt which he sometimes showed for ideas and people who fell short of his own very high standards.

Although Tom Burns could be a marvellous host, and the annual dinner for members of staff and their partners, which he hosted in the earlier years of the department, was a highlight, he was basically rather a shy and very private person, devoted to his wife, Elizabeth, and to their five children. At times he appeared brusque and even offhand; like many interesting, hard-working, talented people these different facets of his complex personality could be baffling and even infuriating. He could be a very warm and helpful person, who would spend hours he didn't have talking to even very junior students as if their thoughts mattered, and treating them as serious scholars. At other times, he seemed quite oblivious to student's names or even who they were. A colleague tells the story that a couple of years after he graduated, he met Tom in the corridor, who thrust a copy of an article on longwall mining into his hands. Mystified, he asked the departmental secretary what on earth he was thinking about. 'Ah', she said, 'he thinks you're in his sociology of work class'. He was however also able to generate great loyalty and affection among his colleagues, something which is especially well reflected in the close and egalitarian working relationship he had over many years with the departmental secretary in question. His frequent complaint that he was hopelessly over-committed eventually led her to leave a note on his desk saying 'learning to say "no" does more good than learning Latin' only to receive the reply next morning 'I never learned Latin'. That somehow sums up the man and his nature.

contact Charlotte MacDonald - charlotte.macdonald AT btinternet.com with any queries or comments.


	Home Organisation and Social Order Biography Published Work	Tom Burns FBA - An Obituary and Appreciation by FB; DMcC and others at the University of Edinburgh Tom Burns who died on 20th June at the age of 88 was Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Edinburgh. He was the founding member of the Department and its first Professor from 1965 till 1981. He was educated at Hague Street, LCC Elementary School; Parmiters Foundation School and the University of Bristol. He served in the Friends Ambulance Unit between 1939 and 1945 and was a prisoner of war in Germany between 1941 and 1943. A research assistant in the West Midland Group on Post-War Reconstruction and Planning from 1945-49, he then came as a lecturer to the University of Edinburgh where he remained till his retirement in 1981. His colleagues held a conference to mark his retirement, and the ease with which a group drawn from the world's leading sociologists was assembled to pay tribute to him speaks volumes for the respect in which he was held. Tom Burns was a sociologist of international distinction, with a remarkable sociological vision and imagination which not only made him a leader in his field but often put him so far ahead of it that his contributions were only fully recognised many years later. He was one of the first sociologists to be elected to a Fellowship of the British Academy but was far more than an outstanding sociologist. His scholarship ranged widely and embraced philosophy, literature and history as well as sociology. He was a profound thinker and an inspiration to his colleagues and students who, even if they did not manage to fully grasp his ideas, something which happened quite often, sensed that they were always original, and at the cutting edge of his subject. He was one of the first British sociologists to look beyond the United States, stressing and developing European links, and bringing current European work to the attention of a wider public. The department at Edinburgh benefited from this in many ways, not least from a steady stream of European visitors. From the first he emphasised the importance of teaching students not just about society, but about the methodologies and skills required to study it. This insistence pre-dated by at least a decade, concerns which surfaced in British sociology about relatively poor methodological training, especially in quantitative methods, and which reverberate to this day. The breadth of his interests, his foresight and originality can readily be seen in his book of essays, Description, explanation and understanding : selected writings, 1944-1980, published by Edinburgh University Press in 1995. His major contributions were to the sociology of organisations and bureaucracy. His first book The Management of Innovation (1961 with G.M.Stalker) remains a landmark study. It showed how innovative organisations depended on informal, often horizontal linkages which did not figure in the formal structures and organisation charts of hierarchical, vertically organised firms, and indeed were frequently discouraged to their long term detriment. These insights have affected organisation theory ever since, sometimes consciously, sometimes as half conscious re-inventions of a wheel. The BBC: Public Institution and Private World (1977), based on 300 interviews he carried out single handed with BBC staff, was the outcome of two extended periods of fieldwork within the BBC first in the early 1960s and again in 1973, and a lengthy struggle to persuade that institution to allow an account to be published. It was typical of Tom Burns' determination and persuasive skills that he eventually overcame the difficulties placed in his path. His profound grasp of the working of organisations was valued outside the academic world. He carried out a study of and consultancy with a large international oil company, which accepted and put into practice many of his recommendations. This practical engagement with the world of industry and commerce was much less common at that time. In this regard too Tom Burns was ahead of the game. He believed strongly that 'society' was much more interesting than 'sociology', and that doing empirical sociology was much more important - and difficult - than theory-building for its own sake. His inaugural lecture in 1965 (Sociological Explanation') remains a touchstone of what sociology is for, and how it is to be done. A key passage which could with benefit be engraved on the hearts of all sociologists and which marked the subsequent work of many of his colleagues runs: "The purpose of sociology is to achieve an understanding of social behaviour and social institutions which is different from that current among the people through whose conduct the institutions exist; an understanding which is not simply different but better. The practice of sociology is criticism. It exists to criticise claims about the value of achievement and to question assumptions about the meaning of conduct. It is the business of sociologists to conduct a critical debate with the public about its equipment of social institutions." Tom Burns was one of those relatively rare people who not only study organisations and institutions but know how to build them. He created a department at the University of Edinburgh which more than 35 years later still to some extent reflects his skill in choosing colleagues with strong talents and skills across the board. He laid the foundation for the department's excellence, which is reflected in its high grades in the Research Assessment Exercises and Teaching Quality Assessments of recent years. Paradoxically, one can be fairly sure that he would have been the first to condemn these developments as distorting of research effort and scholarship, and immensely consuming of time which could be better spent actually doing sociology. Echoes of his ability to forge a working department whose members identified strongly with it and often placed its interests above their own can still be detected to this day. This is partly because many of his colleagues chose, as he had done between 1949 and 1981, to make their entire careers at the University of Edinburgh - eight of them retiring with or still holding personal or established chairs, sometimes outwith the department and in one case in a different discipline, Economic and Social History. Others, who did escape from the department, hold major chairs in other Universities in Britain, Canada, the European University Institute and in the United States. He was an unusual Head of Department, claiming not to be a great administrator, thus forcing younger colleagues to take on responsibilities beyond their years and experience, with well-justified suspicions that his claimed inabilities were more than a little disingenuous. This policy lead to a situation many years later, when in a time of severe financial pressure, a Dean justified not immediately filling the established chair which Burns himself had vacated, on the grounds that there were at least five or six people who could easily run the department. He regularly put forward his colleagues for committees and other roles within the University and outside it, for instance in the British Sociological Association, and encouraged them to be active citizens in the University and the sociological discipline. He was also, in the best sense, a remarkable manipulator of people. During the late 1960s when sociology departments were often riven with discontent, and with younger staff at the throats of their senior colleagues pressing for changes, Edinburgh was an exception to this general rule. It only dawned on his colleagues much later that Tom Burns leadership style might have been deliberately designed to this end. He was continually arguing persuasively for change - in syllabuses, in methods of teaching, assessment and examining, in departmental organisation - so that the prevailing ethos was turned upside down with younger colleagues striving to restrain their Head of Department from his wilder schemes. Tom Burns continual ability to spark off untold numbers of good ideas could have its down side. It led sometimes to the confusion of his luckless postgraduate students who would go in for supervision clutching one do-able idea and come out with six different ones, some marvellous and far better than the original, some quite impracticable. This often left the rest of his dept to pick up the pieces and steer students through to their thesis. Along with his many successes and achievements, he himself was prone to generate and start more work than he ever finished, leading on one memorable occasion to his being black-listed by the Social Sciences Research Council as it then was. He would not have been happy working in the environment of the last decade with its emphasis on measurable outputs of 'product'; he knew from his professional work that the impact of really innovative research is not easily tracked, especially in the short term, and would probably have expressed his opinion robustly and with the contempt which he sometimes showed for ideas and people who fell short of his own very high standards. Although Tom Burns could be a marvellous host, and the annual dinner for members of staff and their partners, which he hosted in the earlier years of the department, was a highlight, he was basically rather a shy and very private person, devoted to his wife, Elizabeth, and to their five children. At times he appeared brusque and even offhand; like many interesting, hard-working, talented people these different facets of his complex personality could be baffling and even infuriating. He could be a very warm and helpful person, who would spend hours he didn't have talking to even very junior students as if their thoughts mattered, and treating them as serious scholars. At other times, he seemed quite oblivious to student's names or even who they were. A colleague tells the story that a couple of years after he graduated, he met Tom in the corridor, who thrust a copy of an article on longwall mining into his hands. Mystified, he asked the departmental secretary what on earth he was thinking about. 'Ah', she said, 'he thinks you're in his sociology of work class'. He was however also able to generate great loyalty and affection among his colleagues, something which is especially well reflected in the close and egalitarian working relationship he had over many years with the departmental secretary in question. His frequent complaint that he was hopelessly over-committed eventually led her to leave a note on his desk saying 'learning to say "no" does more good than learning Latin' only to receive the reply next morning 'I never learned Latin'. That somehow sums up the man and his nature.

	contact Charlotte MacDonald - charlotte.macdonald AT btinternet.com with any queries or comments.