Journal of Early Childhood Research

The introduction to this article will seek to present a distillation of Sally Lubeck's achievements in order to provide a benchmark of existing knowledge in the field of early childhood care and education from her perspective and an indication of its likely future. Her work, it is suggested, provides an exemplification of the new sociology of childhood that is theoretically grounded as well as morally and ethically committed. The contributions and challenges she made that are offered in this article focus on childhood in different cultures, the impact of globalization and the role of cross-national perspectives in the critical examination of our own national contexts. Poverty levels and the choice made by the US and UK to avoid redistribution of wealth are identified as a major source of disadvantage. The tension between decentralization, choice and lack of co-ordination on the one hand, and uniformity, centralization and social control on the other, is emphasized. It is in this context that policy-making in early childhood education is subjected to critical analysis. The possible contribution that the theories of Habermas can make to our understanding of progress and change was raised by Sally (Lubeck, 2001b) and expanded in this article as a means of response.

This article reviews Sally Lubeck's international contributions. It describes her role as rapporteur for the OECD review of early education and care services in the UK, one of 20 such reviews commissioned by the OECD. It discusses the continued relevance of her observations and comments on provision in the UK. The article goes on to comment briefly on her insights into the role of international agencies more generally, and the difficulties of knowledge transfer not only between the rich countries of the OECD but between rich and poor countries across the world.

The focus of this article is on the themes of gender, work, and child care as they have been addressed in much of Sally Lubeck's work, in an attempt to understand her trajectory, and her diverse messages to us. In reading her work for this article, key themes stood out that focus our attention on Sally Lubeck's continuing fight for better public funding for child care/early education in the USA, and for a positive family policy that supports all families, particularly single mothers and their children in the United States. Her research attention was also focused on the wisdom expressed in local cultural systems, by parents and teachers, as well as within societal contexts where care and education for all families and children are prioritized.

The article considers three domains of Sally Lubeck's scholarship as illustrations of her orientation to research on early care and education: her critique of positivism in general and the field of developmental psychology (and the sub-discipline of child development) specifically as the primary source of a `knowledge base' for the field of early childhood education; her concerns about globalization's increasing influence on educational goals and practices; and her quest to expand the potentials of research in a way that illuminates alternative perspectives on the period of early childhood and bridges the divide between the protagonists and subjects of social science. The article concludes with an invitation to others to pick up where Sally left off.