Most sociolegal scholars who study the relationship between law and social change have confronted the tension in law between possibility and pessimism: we know that relying on rights strategies and rights discourse can open up real opportunities for social reform, even as we observe the very significant constraints imposed by law as an avenue for social change (Marshall Reference Marshall2005; Kalev and Dobbin Reference Kalev and Dobbin2006; McCann Reference McCann2006; Stryker Reference Stryker2007; Epp Reference Epp2009; Albiston Reference Albiston2010). All three pieces in this symposium reflect that duality, offering reasons for optimism in the quest for long-term care policy reform while simultaneously noting other reasons for pessimism. I have always found that duality frustrating—not the fact that there is one, but that we know so little about the specific conditions that unleash the emancipatory potential of law. Caring for Our Own (Reference Levitsky2014) is in many ways a pessimistic story of the role our laws play in reinforcing an ideology that minimizes public demand for long-term care policy reform. But the book is also a quest to specify the conditions under which law's capacity to fuel the political imagination outpaces its tendency to dull it. Here I want to draw on the insights offered by Francesca Polletta, Calvin Morrill, and Elizabeth Chiarello to analyze the (more hopeful) comparative case of child care. I argue that much of law's emancipatory power lies in its capacity to “construct anew” (Silbey and Sarat Reference Silbey and Sarat1987, 172)—to demonstrate new solutions to social problems by connecting the familiar with the strange. As the case of child care demonstrates, laws do not automatically provide the cultural resources to construct new claims for state intervention (Polletta); but in the absence of cultural resources in one institution, advocates can strategically shift responsibility for a social problem to a new institution (Chiarello), opening up possibilities for new models, organizational actors, constituencies, and frames (Morrill).

One of the central arguments in Caring for Our Own is that for many years the study of law in everyday life has been largely divorced from the project of studying the policies that shape everyday living (2014, 12). As a consequence, we know very little about how law shapes individual processes of grievance construction. When individuals try to imagine solutions to the problems they face in their everyday lives, they have a limited repertoire of cultural elements to choose from (Swidler Reference Swidler1986; Sewell Reference Sewell1992; Pedriana and Stryker 1997); among those elements are all the laws and social welfare benefits and services that constitute “social policy” in the United States. Our political imagination treats these laws (and the norms, symbols, and meanings that we associate with them) as a bit of a mix-and-match bricolage: the laws and policies intended for one constituency can be reimagined for another (Levitsky Reference Levitsky2014). The lessons learned from social policies about citizenship and self-worth in one context can be transposable to another (Mettler and Soss Reference Mettler and Soss2004; Soss Reference Soss, Schneider and Ingram2005). Thus while existing social policy may be borne of and in many cases reinforce the dominant ideology of any society, it can also potentially play a key role in challenging the norms, beliefs, and practices that constitute that ideology (Hunt Reference Hunt1990; Sewell Reference Sewell1992). But can we better specify that potential? Under what conditions does the reordering of cultural elements (and law in particular) lead to counterhegemonic understandings of the social world?

Caring for Our Own takes a first step in answering that question by focusing on the role of cultural categories in shaping individual responses to social policy dilemmas. All people in society rely on distinctions for making sense of their place in the world—we distinguish between “normal” and “deviant” sexuality, between “good” and “bad” mothers, “masculine” and “feminine” genders, between “deserving” and “undeserving” citizens. These classifications serve as a way of learning the social rules of any group (e.g., what do I have to wear or how should I carry myself if I want to be appropriately feminine?), but they also serve as a reminder of what happens to people when they deviate from those rules. Policymaking also involves the use of social categories, defining who is officially poor and not poor, who is a minority, disabled, married, unemployed, an honorable veteran and so on (Steensland Reference Steensland2006). In policy, these classifications not only have material consequences, but they have symbolic effects: they define membership and assign standing in the political community. They communicate to beneficiaries their worth as citizens and their rights as members of the polity (Mettler and Soss Reference Mettler and Soss2004; Soss Reference Soss, Schneider and Ingram2005).

People are so deeply invested in these distinctions because they reflect things like social status, self-worth, and morality. In the case of long-term care provision, being a “dutiful” family member by taking care of your spouse or parent—no matter what the cost to your health or economic security—reflects positively on who you are and what you stand for (Levitsky Reference Levitsky2014). When the demands of contemporary care provision threaten that status—when caregivers are physically, emotionally, or economically unable to meet the care needs of their family members—they seek solutions to unmet needs that are shaped in critical ways by the desire to restore their status as someone who properly cares for their own. In most cases, this logic produces understandings of care and solutions for unmet needs that legitimate rather than challenge the ideology of family responsibility for care.

Counterhegemonic understandings of long-term care provision emerge only when the process of reasserting one's status as a “dutiful” family member threatens the status of other cultural identities. When this occurs, caregivers transpose cultural resources in ways that seek to retain a positive self-identity across cultural categories. It is this cross-combination of cultural elements that produces understandings of long-term care provision that directly challenge existing systems of social provision, imagining a much more expansive role for the state in safeguarding social welfare.

The most common example of this cited in Caring for Our Own is the case of Medicaid, the public assistance program that provides healthcare to low-income Americans. When family caregivers reach a point where they cannot physically or emotionally provide care on their own, they often seek assistance from paid services such as in-home companions or skilled nursing care, adult daycare, respite care, or nursing home care. Such services are expensive, and they are rarely covered by Medicare or traditional health plans—but they are often covered by Medicaid. In the absence of other alternatives, many families find they have no choice but to apply for Medicaid assistance. Like most means-tested state assistance programs in this country, the eligibility requirements for Medicaid are stringent, so while many families apply for Medicaid assistance, very few actually qualify for benefits. Indeed, this was a primary source of their political grievances. However, what was notable about these grievances is how applicants justified their seeking assistance from Medicaid: if beneficiaries of public assistance programs are often stigmatized in this country as “undeserving” supplicants, these nonpoor family caregivers did not view themselves as charity cases. Instead, most working- and middle-class Medicaid applicants extended the discourse of rights from social insurance programs such as Social Security and Medicare (for which they were eligible) to the context of long-term care provision, recasting Medicaid as a middle-class entitlement owed by the state to deserving citizens like themselves. Caregivers emphasized the fact that they had worked hard and paid their taxes their whole lives, they talked about being law-abiding citizens, and they argued that they were entitled to government assistance to care for their family. This combination of entitlement discourse and the discourse of family responsibility produced understandings of chronic care provision that transcended existing political categories to imagine a new relationship between the state and citizens: the state ought to be doing more to ameliorate the strains of long-term care provision experienced by nonpoor families in the United States.

Querying how this model might extend to other contexts, Polletta raises the comparative case of child care for working parents. Like long-term care, Americans have historically understood the provision of child care to be a family responsibility—and the primary responsibility of women in particular (Michel Reference Michel1999). Like long-term care, US state investment in matters of child care relative to other advanced democracies is exceptionally low (Gornick and Meyers Reference Gornick and Meyers2003). And as Polletta observes, this is also a case where working mothers face conflicting cultural categories: how to maintain a positive self-identity as a “good mother” (who is always there for her children) and a positive self-identity as a “good worker” (who is always there for her job) (Hays Reference Hays1996). But in the case of child care, Polletta argues, the conflict does not seem to create widespread expectations for state subsidies for child care. Instead, many women resolve the conflict between these identities by putting family first: dropping out of the paid labor market, shifting to part-time employment, or pursuing “jobs” rather than careers. Why does not this identity conflict produce claims for state intervention?

One answer lies in the cultural resources that are available for transposition in the case of the “good worker” identity. Being a “good worker” in the United States yields both private and public benefits. In the context of employment, “good workers” might receive better pay and benefits, promotion, and respect—but these are not grist for making claims on the state, as we understand these as private benefits of work. There are also important public benefits attached to employment status in the United States (such as Social Security and unemployment or disability compensation) that might serve as the basis for claims for state intervention—yet these too offer limited resources for claims making in the case of child care. Entitlements to state provision in the United States were originally designed to protect male breadwinners from risks such as unemployment or injury that could jeopardize their ability to support themselves and their families (Fraser and Gordon 1992). The underlying logic of such entitlements, in other words, was income security. Although the institutions of work and family have changed dramatically over the last half-century, that logic has proven stubbornly resistant to transformation. To this day, the United States maintains a haphazard mix of policies that in many ways reinforce the idea that care for children is a private, rather than public, responsibility, including modest tax credits for families who purchase market-based child care and unpaid family leave for qualified workers. Thus the social entitlements attached to the “good worker” identity (and cultural resources derived from those policies for making claims on the US welfare state) are limited to the problem of providing income security for individuals who are unable to work. There is no set of laws or policies attached to US employment from which to derive the expectation that the state ought to subsidize or redistribute the costs of care to enable individuals to work. It is no wonder, then, that in resolving the conflict between being a “good mother” and “good worker,” working mothers craft private solutions to their dilemmas rather than imagine public interventions.

How then to conceptualize an increased role for the state in subsidizing child care for working parents in the absence of state policies from which to build? The answer lies in Chiarello's argument regarding institutional shifts and Morrill's observations about the effects of new organizational actors. We might characterize child care as a social problem trapped in what Chiarello calls an “institutional gap,” where no single institution claims full responsibility: neither the family nor the labor market can fully ameliorate the strains confronted by contemporary working parents. In the context of long-term care, Chiarello contemplates what might be gained by shifting responsibility for long-term care from the family to the institution of medicine. Each has its own institutional logic, or “sets of rules, symbols, and patterns of action” that organize and provide meaning to behavior (Friedland and Alford Reference Friedland, Alford, Powell and DiMaggio1991). By shifting responsibility for a social problem to a different institution, we have access to a new repertoire of rights, frames, and organizational forms. With such a shift, new organizational actors join the field of contentious politics, and, as Morrill observes, these actors can transform the meanings of social problems, change how collective frames resonate, and rework organizational alliances.

Child care is in fact a much more hopeful case than Polletta suggests, precisely because such an institutional shift is currently underway: “child care” is becoming “early childhood education.” During the ten-year period that I was studying long-term care, the politics around child care shifted dramatically. Today, forty-three states spend a total of almost $7.4 billion on publicly funded preschool programs for four-year-olds, and several states and cities have extended such services to three-year-olds (Barnett et al. Reference Barnett, Friedman‐Krauss, Weisenfeld, Horowitz, Kasmin and Squires2016). In Oklahoma, home to one of the highest-quality, most broadly accessible public preschool programs in the country, parents widely understand public school as beginning at age four (Lerner Reference Lerner2012). That this political transformation from “child care” to “early education” has occurred during an era of shrinking welfare state commitments and growing privatization of education (Hacker Reference Hacker2006) makes the shift all the more remarkable.

Importantly, the reframing of child care as early childhood education has involved the strategic bridging of cultural elements of law: we do not have a history of rights to child care in this country, but we do have a long history of embracing the right to a public education. Thus, one way of conceptualizing state intervention for child care is to highlight the educational dimensions of early child development. Like the case of Medicaid and demand for state intervention in long-term care provision, this transformation has drawn on models of social provision designed for the poor.

The political transformation of child care into early childhood education has its roots in President Johnson's War on Poverty. In 1965, the Johnson administration launched Project Head Start, a comprehensive program for poor children that emphasized not only education, but also medical and dental care, nutritious meals, home visits, and parent participation (Rose Reference Rose2010). The program won acclaim as a way to place poor children on equal footing relative to their middle-class peers by offsetting the pernicious effectives of poverty on child development. Although Head Start targeted only low-income children, it paradoxically had a significant effect on the type of care that middle-class parents wanted for their children (Wrigley Reference Wrigley1989).Footnote ¹ Nursery schools had long emphasized the social and emotional development of middle-class children, but not cognitive development. In drawing national attention to the potential educational benefits of preschool for poor children, Head Start raised questions about whether preschool might benefit all children. Middle-class taxpayers, who saw themselves as paying for these benefits for poor children, began demanding similar early childhood advantages for their own children. Preschool enrollments for middle-class children skyrocketed: in 1965, just one-tenth of children aged three or four were enrolled in a formalized preschool program; by 1970, that figure had doubled to one-fifth (Morgan Reference Morgan2001). Thus, one important spillover effect from Head Start was the changing meaning of what constitutes “good” child care services, from custodial care to education (Steinfels Reference Steinfels1973).

While the political fight for state-subsidized child care waxed and waned over the next several decades (Michel Reference Michel1999; Rose Reference Rose2010), evidence about the potential benefits of early childhood education continued to mount. In 1976, a group of researchers formed the Consortium for Longitudinal Studies (CLS), a federally funded effort to pool data from eleven high-quality preschool interventions dating back to the 1960s. Their report confirmed earlier research that cognitive measures like IQ initially improve for low-income children enrolled in preschool, but eventually fade out after several years. Yet these effects paled next to other long-term benefits (Kirp Reference Kirp2007). Following children over a period of decades, researchers found that the children who participated in these preschool programs were less likely to require special education classes or repeat a grade, had higher high school completion rates and employment rates, and lower rates of teenage pregnancy, arrest, and incarceration (Kirp Reference Kirp2007). Beginning in the early 2000s, neuroscience research began to produce rich imagery of brain development demonstrating the importance of children's first five years for their cognitive development (Shonkoff and Phillips Reference Shonkoff and Phillips2000). Taken together, these studies gave new life to the possibilities of early childhood interventions.

But evidence about the potential benefits of early childhood interventions was not enough to trigger the institutional shift from work (and child care) to early childhood education. The catalyst for that transformation was the intervention of advocates—in particular the Pew Charitable Trusts' ten-year $100 million campaign, Pre-K Now, to establish universal prekindergarten on the national political agenda. Pew spearheaded an effort to change the public narrative about child care from a story about working mothers to a story about children's education. To do this, Pew drew on focus group and polling data to develop a sophisticated communications strategy (Levitsky and Russell Reference Levitsky and Russell2017). Advocates began to strategically phase out the terms “child care” and “daycare” and replace them with “child development” and “early education.” The emphasis on education avoided the political contentiousness associated with maternal employment (that working mothers are “bad” mothers) and promoted the idea that not only was preschool good for children, but it was something to which children were entitled as a matter of right. As Steve Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research, explained in an interview: “People don't call [education] an entitlement. But if there's anything core about the American view of the government's role in providing opportunity, it's that everybody ought to be given the opportunity for a good education.”Footnote ² Meera Mani, Director of the Children, Families, and Communities program at the Packard Foundation, Pew's partner in California, echoed the importance of this rhetorical shift: “[N]o one ever questions the need for a K-12 education system, right? It may be broke, it may have its challenges, but nobody ever questions that. And so it's really about attaching yourself to something that people really believe is a right.”Footnote ³

Two important points follow from the case of child care's cultural transformation into early childhood development and education. First, as Polletta observed about the case of long-term care, these transpositions of cultural categories do not so much unsettle binaries between good and bad, deserving and undeserving, so much as relocate them. The successful reframing of child care as early childhood education sidesteps, rather than challenges, negative cultural assumptions about working mothers. This is a significant criticism. But it is important to remember that the object of analysis here (as in Caring for Our Own) is not the cultural category itself, but the effects of navigating cultural categories on the political imagination: How do we draw on and combine distinct elements from cultural and political repertoires to reconceptualize what we expect or demand from the state? As Caring for Our Own illustrates, existing laws are a key source of these cultural elements. Even the most incremental change in law and social policy changes the possibility for future strategic action. What we gain from new expansions of the welfare state (materially and ideologically) may eventually be grist for future challenges to even the most durable social categories.

Second, the case of early childhood education also highlights the critical role of advocates in demonstrating new configurations of social policies that could address social problems. The political success of the early childhood education movement can be traced directly to advocates (Levitsky and Russell Reference Levitsky and Russell2017). This was not a case, in other words, of the collective mobilization of thousands of working mothers, but a product of a sophisticated advocacy strategy: research and branding, press work and lobbying all designed to reframe and promote the idea of state intervention in early childhood care and development. Here, Chiarello's argument about institutional responsibility for social problems meshes well with Morrill's observation about the importance of expanding pathways toward politicization and potential linkages to organized advocacy. Morrill argues that as the population scope of a social problem expands (i.e., who is directly and indirectly affected), and as new organizational actors emerge with novel framings of social problems, the possibilities of new social linkages to advocacy organizations increases. This is one of the key advantages of strategically shifting institutional ownership for social problems: it links the problem to an entirely new field of organizational actors, constituencies, and frames. Indeed, this was the case with early childhood education. When early actors in the movement shifted away from the problem of child care and maternal employment to early childhood education, they created a new set of potential political alliances (Rose Reference Rose2010; Levitsky and Russell Reference Levitsky and Russell2017). Economic research by such notables as Nobel laureate James Heckman (Reference Heckman2006) on the economic returns of state investment in early childhood education commanded the attention of business leaders. K–12 educators joined forces with physician advocacy organizations, law enforcement advocacy organizations, and more traditional children's welfare organizations to change the public conversation around early child development and education: “good mothers” could not only feel good about placing their children in high-quality preschool environments, but they should expect subsidized access to preschool as a matter of right (Levitsky and Russell Reference Levitsky and Russell2017).

One way of specifying the conditions for unleashing the emancipatory potential of law, then, is to study law not only as a reform strategy or goal, but as a cultural resource. Existing laws—and the symbols, narratives, and norms that we associate with them—serve as grist for the political imagination when deployed by individuals seeking to navigate both the strain of contemporary social problems and the complexities of cultural identities. But, as others have observed, the mobilization of new ideas for how to resolve social problems requires advocates to shape the political narrative about those solutions, including which institutions “own” the problem and how to “construct anew” (Silbey and Sarat Reference Silbey and Sarat1987, 172) with the building blocks of the familiar.