When organisations go through a reorganisation phase, it is more than probable that the social and professional reproduction phase will be particularly tense. To illustrate my point, I use ethnographic data on two different organisations and professions: typographers and policemen in the Portuguese context. In the text considerable importance is attributed to the expression of forms of resistance to change, to cycles of renovation and remodelling organisations go through. In order to describe and analyse the social interactions and cultural representations that are drawn in social reality, the ethnographic method of observation has turned out to bean essential tool.