ABSTRACT
This chapter starts with the proposal that broad efforts towards reform in government structure and benefit provision represent more than a political party’s hopes to make an impact upon government (even if only for the sake of impact) while the opportunity persists. It adopts an isomorphic, institutional approach to the Universal Credit, because such analyses enable 1, consideration of the interaction between governments and taxpayers in policy formation, and 2, wide ranging considerations of social change in the family. The chapter integrates discussions surrounding the Universal Credit in the United Kingdom (UK) into existing, socio-legal literature engaging with New Labour’s ‘working families tax credit’. The institutional analysis deployed in the chapter is undertaken with an eye upon the feminist potential of such analyses. The chapter concludes with the suggestion that the confusion which the Universal Credit was introduced to address is perhaps ascribable to changes in the role of women in the economy, as differentiated from paperwork, or bureaucratic language.
