Last week, Harold Garfinkel, one of the greatest sociologists of the second half of the 20th century, died. He was 93. Garfinkel, actually, would have scoffed at the idea of being called a sociologist. When he came of age, sociologists were too engaged in abstractions, in attempts to make sweeping generalizations. Though Garfinkel himself was the student of one of the greatest systematizers of them all, Talcott Parsons, he took a radically different stance.

Instead of allying himself with this way of doing sociology, Garfinkel turned to the New School, and the work of exiled philosopher Alfred Schutz, as a way out of grand abstractions. Instead of looking at society in the abstract, he slowly built up a language that would allow him to study what was going on in the here-and-now, the way people actually made sense of their world as they went along in the business of living. Instead of Society, with a capital “S,” he became immersed in the methods people use to make a situation what it is. In his apt, and often misunderstood, term, he became interested in ethnomethodology.

In the context of the 1960s, ethnomethodology became a banner for studying the actual way people navigate their lives. Intellectuals that were disillusioned with abstract sociology, people like Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, Mel Pollner, and even the writer Carlos Castaneda, became allied with what was emerging as a movement on the West Coast of the USA, with its headquarters in UCLA, where Garfinkel did some of his most important work.

Though Garfinkel’s thought is rich and complex, and evolved throughout his life, there are a few themes that he stayed true to since his groundbreaking 1967 Studies in Ethnomethodology. One is how inherently fragile our world was, how much work went into sustaining it, work that was not natural, but could be always undone. In John Heritage’s terms, order was constructed in the making, like The Beatles’ “Yellow Brick Road.”  To show that, and to show how we constantly work to sustain our work, Garfinkel engaged in “Breaching Experiments,” unleashing his students on an unsuspecting world, wrecking interactional havoc. From simple assignments, such as asking them to haggle for prices at the supermarket, or blatantly disregard the rules of children’s game, he showed both how much work it took to sustain seeming order, and that this work was never-ending.

Thus, to be an ethnomethodologist, Garfinkel advised students to focus on actual action, to look at the minutiae of action in the making. To study how people played the piano, it wasn’t enough refer to “socialization” or “learning,” rather how people learned to put their fingers on the keyboard needed to be investigated. In order to study astrophysics, students needed to become immersed in the world astrophysicists created in their work. Almost in direct opposition to most sociology, he reiterated his disgust at abstraction, at the identification of abstract “social forces.”

But for all that, Harold Garfinkel had a profound influence on world sociology. The call to pay attention to actual action, to the ongoing production of order, is seen everywhere today—from the field of Conversation Analysis that attempts to perform an ethnomethodology of everyday conversations, to the study of organizations and the relationships between myths and practicalities of bureaucracy in the new institutionalism.  Anthony Giddens was inspired by Garfinkel in his stints at UCLA; Pierre Bourdieu read Garfinkel carefully, and the two had their own shouting match at the house of a mutual friend. Indeed ethnomethodology is so inscribed in sociology that it often becomes transparent, the greatest achievement a theory can have.

Garfinkel was active to the very end, re-organizing his life’s work, thinking of writing another book. It is a great loss that this book will not be written.