Summary
In 2021, Indigenous Nahua community members and Zapatista-influenced activists occupied a Bonafont–Danone bottling plant near Puebla, Mexico, and rebuilt it as the People’s House (Altepelmecalli), organizing daily life around ecological rhythms, dialogue-centered assemblies, and care rather than deadlines, quotas, and growth targets. Our article published in the Journal of Management Studies conceptualizes this as temporal sovereignty and introduces ‘time-less organizing’ as a decolonial practice that decouples organizing from chronometric efficiency to defend water, community autonomy, and life.
The storyline
The article asks how communities enact temporal sovereignty when they confront extractive industries whose operations are governed by linear, growth- and efficiency-driven schedules that treat time as a resource and water as a commodity. Focusing on the 2021 occupation of the Bonafont–Danone plant in Juan C. Bonilla, the paper traces how activists transformed a “project of death” into a “project of life” by aligning organizing with land, water, and intergenerational obligations rather than with quarterly targets or negotiation timetables.
Why time matters here
Management and organization studies have long contemplated clock time and productivity, but have rarely examined how alternative temporalities can remake organizing itself, especially in conflicts over land and water involving Indigenous communities. Drawing on Zapatista principles such as “walking at the pace of the slowest” and convening encuentros (assemblies) without pre-set finish times, the paper shows how time is not neutral but a terrain of struggle and a capacity that communities can reclaim.
Methodology
The article is based on in-person qualitative research with 24 participants, 17 interviews, 62 hours of participant observation, and analysis of 97 media reports (2021-2024). A decolonial, reciprocity-focused approach guided the work, including respecting community protocols and returning translated results to the People’s House.
Key findings
The occupation reoriented daily life to ancestral and ecological cycles, including agroecology, shared meals, animal husbandry, ritual offerings, and patient assemblies, displacing the plant’s production cadence with relational, seasonal time.
Assemblies prioritized elders and children, embraced long, dialogue-rich deliberation, and explicitly refused speaker time limits or deadline-driven decision-making, operationalizing “walking at the pace of the slowest.”
This temporal autonomy made co-optation more difficult: in a leaderless, assembly-centered structure, corporate actors could not “find the leader” or force the movement back onto corporate calendars.
Activists framed refusal to synchronize with extraction timetables as defending life and water, asserting that “we are Nature” and linking water care to intergenerational responsibilities and grounded normativity.
The big idea: Time-less organizing
Time-less organizing captures a quite simple shift, that instead of letting clocks, deadlines, and deliverables govern collective action, organizing is governed by active listening and dialogue, so that decisions can be made in ways that defend water, territory, community relations, autonomy, and life. The People’s House assemblies began when people arrived (often after cooking, eating, and informal conversations) and ended when the matter was sufficiently discussed, not when a time slot ran out. Work was coordinated through shared responsibility rather than timed “shifts.” People volunteered for tasks they knew how to do such as cooking, cleaning, caring for animals, hosting visitors, tending agroecology, without prioritizing speed.
A useful way to think about it is the difference between a ‘meeting culture’ that rewards the fastest speaker and a ‘listening culture’ that makes space for those who need more time – elders, children, and those still forming their thoughts. At the People’s House, slowing down was considered inefficiency; rather it was a political and ethical practice that made different futures possible.
Why it matters beyond theorizing
For managers and policymakers, ‘engagement’ can fail when built around rigid timelines—fixed consultation windows, quarterly reporting cycles, and deliverables that assume communities should synchronize with corporate tempo. A practical alternative is to let communities set the pace and format. For example, agreeing that major decisions follow local assemblies and that timelines flex around seasonal, cultural and ecological constraints.
For NGOs, mediators, and public agencies working on conflict resolution, a second implication is procedural. I would encourage them to build processes that reward listening rather than efficiency. This can be as straightforward as removing speaker time limits in community forums when stakes are existential, scheduling multiple shorter sessions instead of one “one-shot” meeting, and explicitly budgeting time for relationship-building (shared meals, experiences and informal conversations) as part of the work and not as a “nice extra.”
For community organizers and social movements, temporal autonomy can act as a protective strategy. In leaderless, assembly-centered organizing, outside actors cannot easily “find the leader,” compress the process, or regain control by imposing deadlines. In that sense, time-less organizing is not only about values; it can also be a practical defence against co-optation.
Practical takeaways
- Reframe timelines. Allow consent, consultation, and conflict resolution to follow community assemblies, seasonal rhythms anchored in nature, and ritual calendars rather than corporate or organizational deadlines.
- Design for inclusion. Prioritize those most often excluded such as elders, children, and those needing more time, so decisions are both legitimate and durable.
- Protect autonomous spaces. Control of space is crucial for time-less organizing. Physical control of space enables control of time; without it, chronometric discipline quickly reasserts itself through schedules and deliverables.
- Measure what matters. Track relational repair, participation, and ecological indicators alongside, or instead of, output and speed.
A note on water, conflict, and futures
The plant’s shutdown coincided with a widely publicized sinkhole nearby and community assertions that groundwater began to recover, underscoring the stakes of extraction timetables that ignore aquifer and watershed time. As water conflicts intensify globally, the paper invites readers to reimagine governance through temporal sovereignty in order to cultivate patient collaboration, intergenerational responsibility, and ecological attunement.
