In this book we set out to investigate the ongoing transformations of the Swedish welfare state against the background of its twentieth-century development. We started by depicting an important event taking place in the early 1990s, when the centre-right government declared that they would implement a ‘system shift’. The neoliberal ideology inspiring this shift had already influenced the Social Democratic government’s mid-1980s economic policy, in its attempts to find a way out of the economic problems of the 1970s and the early 1980s. It was, however, not until the 1990s that an increasing number of social spheres and a substantial part of the population started to become seriously affected by the cutbacks in the public sector and the reorganization of the welfare system in Sweden, previously often perceived as a ‘model country’ in the context of welfare policy discourse.