Tom Burns FBA (1913–2001) was an English sociologist, author and founder of the Sociology department at Edinburgh University.

[3][4] A Fellow of the British Academy,[5] Tom Burns was Professor of Sociology at Edinburgh University from 1965 to 1981,[1] and also taught at Harvard and Columbia.

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.

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."

Burns used the opportunity to bring the study up to date and show how administrative changes were impinging on concepts of work, public service and commitment to the BBC.

Following his retirement from academic life in 1981, he worked on a comparative history of organization entitled Organisation and Social Order until his death in 2001.

In his obituary was published along with his unfinished manuscript said "Tom Burns was one of those relatively rare people who not only study organisations and institutions but know how to build them.