Thomas Rearden Burns (27 February 1937 – 25 April 2025) was a Swedish-American sociologist and academic, who was professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Uppsala in Sweden and founder of the Uppsala Theory Circle.Joseph Rogers Hollingsworth, Karl H. Müller, Jane Hollingsworth (2005) Advancing Socio-Economics: An Institutionalist Perspective. p. 435
Biography Burns grew up in Arkansas, United States, and was in a Franciscan Monastery for a number of years. As a teenager, he attended Phillips Academy Andover in Massachusetts, before going to Stanford University to study physics and mathematics, where he obtained his BS in physics in 1959. In the years 1959–60 he studied physics and sociology for almost two years at the University of Warsaw, Poland, as an exchange student from Stanford. He returned to Stanford, where he obtained his MA in sociology in 1962 and his PhD in sociology in 1969.CURRICULUM VITAE: TOM R. BURNS at webb.uu.se. Accessed 26 May 2015.James Franklin (1976) The Rhode Island Almanack. Vol 3–4. p. 41
He started his academic career as assistant professor at the George Washington University, and moved to the University of New Hampshire in 1968, where he became associate professor in 1973. From 1976 to 1983 he was senior researcher at the Scandinavian Institutes for Administrative Research. In this period he also was Professor at the Stockholm University in Sweden from 1978 to 1980, Professor at the University of Oslo in Norway from 1979 to 1982.
In 1982 he was appointed to the position of Professor of Sociology at the University of Uppsala, which he held until 2002 after which he became emeritus Professor. Back in the United States he was also Clarence J. Robinson University Professor at the George Mason University from 1987 to 1990. From 2003 to 2006 he was NORFA Professor at the Centre for International Environment and Development Studies at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. He was visiting professor at the Lisbon University Institute (ISCTE), in Portugal from 2007 to 2013.
Among his other professional engagements, he has been Jean Monnet Visiting professor at the European University Institute, Florence, Italy, 2002; Visiting Scholar, Stanford University, Spring, 2002, Spring, 2004–2008; Fellow at Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (Spring, 1992; Autumn, 1998), and Fellow at the European University Institute (Spring, 1998).
Burns died in Uppsala, Sweden on 25 April 2025, at the age of 88.Funeral. uu.se, 21 May 2025. Retrieved 28 May 2025.
Uppsala Theory Circle Burns was the founder of the Uppsala Theory Circle (UTC) at Uppsala University,Bernd Kasemir (2003) Public Participation in Sustainability Science: A Handbook. p. vii devoted to the development of sociological and social science theory and its applications in empirical and policy research. UTC functioned as an international, interdisciplinary collegium of scholars. 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.
The group conducted regular seminars, workshops, etc. often engaging leading Swedish and international scholars who were fellows at The Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. Beginning in the mid-1980s, this institution brought many distinguished scholars to Uppsala, in particular. The UTC was particularly active in the 1980s and 1990s. Since 2000, much of the core, which was engaged initially in Uppsala, has dispersed within and outside of Sweden.
Work
Actor-system dynamics (ASD) 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.Ruth Wodak, Paul Paul Anthony Chilton (2005) A New Agenda in (critical) Discourse Analysis: Theory, Methodology and Interdisciplinarity.. p.307 They have been developing a new theory complex, which came to be referred to as actor-system dynamics (ASD), a new social systems theory, substantially different from Parson's systems theory and the systems theory later developed by Niklas Luhmann.Tom R. Burns, Thomas Martin Baumgartner, Philippe DeVille (1985) Man, Decisions, Society: : The Theory of Actor-system Dynamics for Social Scientists. Gordon and Breach Science Publishers.
This approach brought human agents in a natural and coherent way into system modelling. It saw agents (individuals and collectives) in their strategems and ploys as constrained as well as enabled by system structures, but also as forces structuring and restructuring systems and, in some instances, creating entirely new ones.
This theoretical work always went hand in hand with a wide range of empirical investigations. It built bridges not only within the social sciences and humanities but also between the social sciences and humanities, on the one hand, and the natural, technical, and medical sciences, on the other hand. Research projects on the environment, technology, engineering, and medicine were an expression of this interdisciplinarity.
Social rule system theory
On the basis of ASD theory Burns and Dietz developed a non-biological theory of sociocultural evolution, which they called Social rule system theory.
Social rule system theory was formulated in the 1980s by Burns and Helena Flam together with others was a contribution to the New Institutionalism.
Sociology of human consciousness
In the 1990s a sociology of human consciousness was developed by Burns, Erik Engdahl, Nora Machado, and Sviatoslav Korepov based on sociology and social psychology traditions, in particular inspired by George Herbert Mead. 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.
Rule complex A rule complex is a set consisting of rules and/or other rule complexes. This is a generalization of a set of rules, and provides a tool to investigate and describe how rules can function as values, norms, judgmental or prescriptive rules, and meta-rules. Also possible is to examine objects consisting of rules such as roles, routines, algorithms, models of reality, social relationships, and institutions. In game theory, rules and rule complexes can be used to define the behavior and interactions of the players (although the rules are not necessarily static). Rule complexes are especially associated with Tom R. Burns, Anna Gomolinska and the Uppsala Theory Circle.
Formalization In this setting, a rule is type of knowledge (in the sense of epistemic logic (see Fagin, 2003)) formalized as a set of premises or conditions, a set of justifications, and a set of conclusions (this may be written as a triple, a rule ). Elements of X should hold, and of Y may hold. If Y, the justifications, do not hold, then the rule cannot be applied. If X, the premises, obtain and the justifications are not known to not apply, then the rule is applied, and is concluded. If X and Y are empty, then the rule is axiomatic (a "fact" or unconditional directive). Thus, rules can be seen as the basic objects of knowledge.
Formally, a rule complex is the class which contains all finite sets of rules, is closed under set-theoretical union and power set, and preserves inclusion:
Any finite set of rules is a rule complex; If are rule complexes, then and are rule complexes; If and is a rule complex, then is a rule complex.
This means that for rule complexes and , are also rule complexes. A complex is a subcomplex of the complex if or may be obtained from by deleting some rules from and/or redundant parentheses (Burns, 2005).
Generalized game theory Generalized game theory is an extension of game theory incorporating social theory concepts such as norm, value, belief, role, social relationship, and institution. The theory was developed by Tom R. Burns, Anna Gomolinska, and Ewa Roszkowska but has not had great influence beyond these immediate associates. The theory seeks to address certain perceived limitations of game theory by formulating a theory of rules and rule complexes and to develop a more robust approach to socio-psychological and sociological phenomena.
Overview In generalized game theory, games are conceptualized as rule complexes, which is a set containing rules and/or other rule complexes. However, the rules may be imprecise, inconsistent, and even dynamic. Distinctions in the properties and functions of different types of rules allows the rules themselves to be analyzed in complex ways, and thus the models of the theory more closely represent relationships and institutions investigated in the social sciences.
The ways in which the rules may be changed is developed within the context of generalized game theory based on the principle of rule revision and game restructuring. These types of games are referred to as open games, that is, games which are open to transformation. Games which have specified, fixed players, fixed preference structures, fixed optimization procedures, and fixed action alternatives and outcomes are called closed games (characteristic of most classical game theory models).
Because its premises derive from social theory generalized game theory emphasizes and provides cultural and institutional tools for game conceptualization and analysis,(Baumgartner et al., 1975, see Burns, 2005) what Granovetter (1985) refers to as the social embeddedness of interaction and social and economic processes.(Granovetter, 1985) This is in contrast to conceptualization of games consisting of actors which are autonomous utility maximizers. Further, the modeling of the actors themselves in generalized game theory is especially open to the use of concepts such as incomplete information and bounded rationality.
Proponents of generalized game theory have advocated the application of the theory to reconceptualizing individual and collective decision-making, resolutions of the prisoners' dilemma game, agent-based modeling, fuzzy games, conflict resolution procedures, challenging and providing robust and normatively grounded alternatives to Nash equilibrium and Pareto optimality, among others.
Principles
Judgment in generalized game theory A key aspect of actors decision making in generalized game theory is based on the concept of judgment. Several types of judgment could be relevant, for instance value judgment, factual judgment, and action judgment. In the case of action judgment, the actor seeks to take the course of action offered by the rules of the game which most closely fit the values held by the actor (where the values are a sub-rule complex of the game).
Predicting how actors will react under these sub-rules is hypothesised to be more accurate than forming traditional game theory complexes. Armstrong (2002) found that when actors hold differing beliefs and roles within a sub-game formal game theory Nash equilibriums became less reliable (generalised game theory has received less scrutiny due to lack of notoriety).