From 2003 to 2006 he was NORFA Professor at the Centre for International Environment and Development Studies at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences.
Beginning in the early 1970s, Burns collaborated with a number of researchers, such as Thomas Baumgartner, Walter F. Buckley, Matthew Cooper, Philippe DeVille, David Meeker, Bernard Gauci, among others.
Social rule system theory was formulated in the 1980s by Burns and Helena Flam together with others was a contribution to the New Institutionalism.
In addition, a number of new theoretical concepts such as social structuring, meta-power and relational control, organizational dissonance and contradiction, and public policy paradigm theory were formulated and applied in empirical investigations.
On a policy oriented level, the risks of complex socio-technical systems, the emergence of post-parliamentary democracy and new forms of governance, and the instabilities and ecological and social destructiveness of capitalism have been particular foci of attention since the early 1990s.
A major pole of UTC was located in Uppsala, Sweden, but with contributors and participants found in other parts of Europe as well as in China, Africa, and the Americas.
Burns and his collaborators have published more than 10 books and numerous articles on theory and methodology as well as more empirically and policy-oriented in the areas of socio-economics, markets and market regulation, the sociology of technology, environment, and natural resources, administration and management, governance and politics.