Dr. Thomas J. Burns is Professor of Sociology and a faculty member in Religious Studies at the University of Oklahoma. His work examines how cultural, organizational and belief systems, including religion, education and politics, develop in relation to one another in light of their comparative and historical contexts.  He has published extensively on a variety of topics, particularly on institutional systems and their outcomes in terms of human well being and long-term sustainability.

Prof. Burns’s research is directed to developing a theoretical framework describing the outcomes, evolution and emergence of social institutions from a comparative and historical perspective, and testing and refining that framework through empirical analysis.  He examines outcomes of global and domestic institutional processes particularly in studies of the environment and health, and address questions of institutional evolution by tracing how organizational systems, such as religion, education and the military, develop in relation to one another in light of their comparative and historical contexts; in work on institutional emergence, he investigates ways in which macro-level institutional practices arise from individual cognitive processes and micro-level interactions.  Dr. Burns’s primary methodological approach is to analyze data sets containing macro- and/or individual-level indicators, using quantitative techniques such as structural equation and time series modeling; he complements this with qualitative work, including discourse analysis and the examination of historical archives.