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"The conventional wisdom is that government programs often don't work and that government organizations last forever. In a powerful analysis, Cassell shows how two agencies in the U.S. and Germany made programs work-and how they then put themselves out of business. The result is an important contribution to our understanding of political economy, public policy, and public management." - Donald F. Kettl, University of Wisconsin-Madison; "A thorough and outstandingly knowledgeable study.... [An account] of impressive depth and accuracy on institutional building and its political embeddedness in the realm of large-scale privatization." - Wolfgang Seibel, University of Konstanz; "Cassell provides us with a rigorously detailed organizational study.... In doing this he draws heavily on the public management literature, but Cassell seeks to extend this literature to an analysis of public/private hybrid agencies that, by some accounts, are becoming more common. Cassell's multilayered analysis is sophisticated and carefully thought out. He presents and contextualizes in clear form the myriad forces that undoubtedly shape the behavior of public agencies." - Governance"
List of contents
List of Figures and Tables List of Abbreviations Preface and Acknowledgements Prologue 1. Introduction: How the Resolution Trust Corporation and the Treuhandansalt Managed the Sales of the Century 2. Bureaucratic Outputs 3. Personnel, Culture, and Organizational Structure: The Impact of Administrative Characteristics on the Performance of the RTC and THA 4. Structured Choices and Consequences 5. The Impact of Task Environment on Performance 6. The Impact of National Institutional Environments 7. Stragetic Bureaucracies and Their Consequences Appendix -- Interviews References Index
About the author
Mark Cassell is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Kent State University.
Summary
A study of two successful divestment agencies - the US Resolution Trust Corporation and the German Treuhandanstalt - that presents a complex understanding of the two agencies' performance in privatizing hundreds of billions of dollars of assets following two very different crises, the savings and loan debacle in the US and unification in Germany.
