Bureaucracy and innovative organizations : contrasting the Finnish mobile content companies with Weber's 15 tendancies of bureaucracy

This empirical paper examines the presence of bureaucracy in the mobile content providing companies in Finland. Interview data, gathered from ten companies, is compared to and contrasted with the 15 tendencies of bureaucracy as defined by Max Weber and Stewart Clegg. The findings indicate that 2 bureaucracy is linked to clarity. However, otherwise it is seen by interviewees as inhibiting their freedom and negatively impacting their organization’s innovativeness. Bureaucracy is not found to be a mode of organizing in the mobile content companies. Instead, a mobile content company is a web-like structure in which the bureaucratic tendencies are largely absent. This paper provides further evidence that innovative organizations do not organize themselves bureaucratically. Keywords: bureaucracy, innovation, innovative organization, organizational structures, mobile telephony, Finland