ABSTRACT
Ulf Kristersson describes how Swedish social legislation has evolved during the 20th century. The Swedish social state entails far more than social insurance. It includes also welfare services in natura: pre-natal care clinics, day nurseries, after-school recreation centers, job centers, welfare offices, hospitals, homes for the elderly, other municipal housing for the elderly. Most research inside Sweden on the Swedish welfare state blissfully and tacitly takes its point of departure in those values of popular rhetoric which have come to dominate within the department and the institutions of public welfare and in the unions whose members run the welfare state. The development of public social patronage to the welfare populations usually runs on the fuel of concessions to major interest lobbies, but its lubricant has been ethical considerations with humanitarian overtones. Employees in public social patronage form three groups: business personnel in the nationalized corporations within the social welfare sector, administrative bureaucrats and service workers, and specialists and technocrats.
