An Operational Perspective:
How Are the Jobs and
Responsibilities of Doug
Costle, Director of EPA, and
Roy Chapin, CEO of American
Motors, Similar and Different?
If organizations could be separated neatly into two homogeneous piles, one public and one private, the task of identifying similarities and dihelences between managers of these enterprises would be relatively easy. In fact, as Dunlop has pointed out "the real world of management is composed of distributions, rather than single undifferentiated forms, and there is an increasing variety of hybrids." Thus for each major attribute of organizations, specific entities an be located on a spectrum. On most dimensions, organizations classified as "predominantly public" and those "predominantly private" overlap.14 Private business organizations enormously among themselves in size, in management structure and philosophy, and in the constraints under which they operate. For example, forms of ownership and types of managerial control may be somewhat unrelated. Compare a family-held enterprise, for instanceÅwith a public utility and a decentralized conglomerate, a Bechtel with AIT and Textron. Similarly, there are vast differences in management of governmental organizations. Compare the Government Printing Office or TVA or the police department of a small town with the Department of Energy or the Department of Health and Human Services. These distributions and varieties should encourage penetrating comparisons within both business and governmental organizations, as well as contrasts and comparisons across these broad tx a point to which we shall return in considering directions for research.
Absent a major research effort, it may nonetheless be worthwhile to examine the jobs and responsibilities oftwo specific managers, neither polar extremes, but one clearly public, the other private. For this purpose, and primarily because ofthe availability of cases that describe the problems and opportunities each confronted, consider Doug Costle, Administrator of EPA, and Roy Chapin, CEO of American Motors.