Reporter Volume 25, No.6 October 7, 1993


By MARK WALLACE
Reporter Staff

These days Robert Chatov gets his kicks from karate.
	For Chatov, karate is just the most recent in a long list of
activities not usually associated with being a professor of
management. He is a musician who at various times has played string
bass, clarinet and cello. He is an amateur woodworker who restores and
finishes violins and other string instruments. And after more than ten
years of studying Isshin Ryu, a form of karate developed in Okinawa,
Chatov soon expects to have his black belt.
	"It's helpful to be interested in things apart from your
research and your profession," he says. "It provides for a
regeneration of your professional interests and gives you an
opportunity to experience different things. It widens your perspective
and makes for a fuller life."
	Chatov became a professor in the Department of Accounting and
Law at the UB School of Management when he was in his mid-forties,
after many years of other activities. He was a member of the U.S. Army
in Italy during Word War II, and had a long career at Ford Motor
Company. He earned a law degree and practiced part time as a member of
the Michigan Bar Association. And his wide variety of academic
research has been aided by his extensive reading in thinkers such as
Freud.
	In conversation, Chatov is extremely energetic, proceeding
from topic to topic with great enthusiasm. It's also clear, as he
launches into the details of his experiences, that he's a born
storyteller.
	"In World War II I was part of the army of occupation,
although I never saw combat. In my outfit I was the drum major in the
marching band, a clarinet player in the concert band, and the string
bass player in the jazz band.
	"In the army, after basic training, I was assigned to a band
in Italy that had been part of the 36th infantry. After Rome was
taken, the band was made the post band at the Fifth Army Rest Center.
The Center had originally been built by Mussolini as a monument to
Italian fascism, and we were surrounded by statues that he had put
there as part of the monument. The monument hadn't been very
successful, however--none of the statues had been put there after
1940."
	After the war, Chatov went back to college, playing in various
jazz bands to supplement the money for schooling that came to him from
the GI Bill.
	"I really like music, but I knew I didn't have enough talent
to be a first-class musician," he says. "I was good, maybe even very
good, but I knew I wasn't great. I had no intention of being a
professional musician."
	After earning a master's degree in economics from Northwestern
University in 1951, Chatov started on a business career with Ford
Motor Company that lasted 17 years and included work in international
marketing and product planning.
	"I have the distinctive ignominy of being part of the market
research for the Edsel," he says. "I tell my students that and they
get nervous. But although the product itself was a bungle, the
marketing distribution was actually well done. Then later I went into
international marketing where I specialized for a while in European
heavy trucks.
	"But I was underemployed intellectually at Ford, and
eventually decided to complete my Ph.D. in economics. I found out I
couldn't take night classes at the University of Michigan, so one day
I decided to go down to Wayne State University and enroll in a degree
program there. ButQand this will tell you how naive I wasQwhen I got
there I found out that they didn't even offer a doctorate in
economics. Then, as I was leaving the campus, I passed the Wayne State
Law School, walked in and told them I wanted to take a law class. They
laughed at me and said I had to apply firstQwhich I did, and
considering my record, got in easily.
	"Several years later I graduated with a law degree, although I
didn't want to practice law and had no intention even of taking the
bar exam. But a colleague accused me of being afraid to take it, so I
did, and I passed. I did some practicing on the side as a member of
the Michigan bar. The only case I ever lost was my own--which proves
the point of the joke that 'a lawyer who works on his own case has a
fool for a client.'"
	When he came to UB in 1972, Chatov found his earlier
experience very helpful to his academic career. "My eclectic
background has crept into my writing and research," he says. "When you
work for a large industrial firm, you develop skepticism that you
might not develop otherwise. I earned a Ph.D. in business policy from
UC Berkeley, and studied sociology there as an underlying theoretical
discipline. I studied economic history at Northwestern, and I have a
law degree. And my work in psychology has proved very usefulQthe
Freudian notion that there's no such thing as an accident underlies
much of my academic work."
	Chatov's academic work has often focused on institutional
organization. "Institutional behavior is predictable," he says. "If
you can understand an organization you can predict what it's going to
do. But you have to separate its public relations stance from what its
people are actually doing. What matters is not what they say, but what
they do."
	Chatov's other academic involvements reflect his varied
expertise. He's the chair of the Faculty Senate Athletics and
Recreation Committee, and last spring was asked by the university
administration to be an internal reviewer for the Department of
Music's Accreditation Review. And he recently was asked to chair the
Management Minor Revisions Subcommittee of the Undergraduate Committee
of the School of Management.
	As a teacher, he has a reputation for eccentricity that he
claims to enjoy, and even seems to foster. He teaches a core course in
the MBA program called "The Government and The Firm," and every spring
gives a seminar entitled "The Coming of Managerial Capitalism," a
course in American business and economic history. "My students have
given me a series of awards, including Most Eccentric Professor and
The Professor Most Likely To Go Off On A Tangent, although I don't
really go off on tangents all that much," he says. "I think these
awards are great, because students wouldn't give them to me if they
weren't responding positively to the class and to the material."
	But as involving as his academic career is, it has never taken
Chatov away from his other interests. In recent years he has been a
cellist with various amateur string quartets and orchestras. He has
restored violins and cellos, doing cosmetic woodwork that returns them
to workable condition, taking advantage of a skill in working with
wood that dates back to his childhood interest in building model ships
and airplanes. And, to keep in shape, he continues to work towards his
black belt.
	"I've always felt that it's important to be a doer rather than
a watcher," he says. "I suppose my range of interests may seem
extreme, but it's really not. It's music on the one hand, physical
exercise on the other. Having physical and mental discipline of that
sort helps every aspect of one's life. I really feel like I've been
very lucky to have a chance to do all the things I've done."