Fixing and unfixing resistance: definitional struggles and temporal negotiations in two non-traditional organisations

This article explores how two non-traditional organisations constitute themselves as resistant organisations through communicative practices. One organisation operates in a sociocratic manner and works towards a socio-ecological transition, while the other is a non-profit initiative raising awareness of gender equality. Drawing on the Communicative Constitution of Organisations (CCO) framework, we identify two intertwined practices: definitional struggles over political terms and the negotiation of temporalities. Definitional struggles fix shared vocabularies into lexicons while remaining open to future renegotiation; temporal negotiations resist the pressure of bureaucratic urgency through deliberate pacing strategies, alternating between acceleration and deceleration. The article focuses on these moments of fixation that function as provisional stabilisations of meaning and pace and it shows how resistance is not a stable accomplishment but an ongoing process through which non-traditional organisations continually fix and refix how they are.