Harold Garfinkel was one of the most important American sociologists. A student of Talcott Parsons who also worked with Alfred Schutz and Kenneth Burke, he sought to craft an empirical and theoretical approach that would combine Parsons' focus on social systems of interaction with the focus on practices in their course of Burke and Schutz. This previously unpublished manuscript titled Parsons Primer in which Garfinkel explains Parsons' position on systems of social interaction and how it relates to Garfinkel's own position is an important missing piece of Garfinkel's argument.

The original manuscript from 1962/63 has been edited and a new introduction written for it by Anne W. Rawls and Jason Turowetz.