摘要：In this article, institutional issues present in the formation years of a small firm that develops, manufactures and sells medical-hospital instruments in the state of Pernambuco, Brazil, are discussed. It was adopted a literature situated in the confluence among the institutionalist tradition and approaches that consider that action is not fully externally determined. The work illustrates the institutional challenges and legitimacy strategies of the firm in its ten initial years of existence. The study, classified as “generic qualitative” (MERRIAM, 1998), was based on secondary data, documents and a semistructured interview with the main executive of the firm. The result indicate a complex institutionalization pattern of this small firm, in which the entrepreneur faced with entities in different and varied degrees of institutionalization and within different relation categories. He contracted relations both with objectified institutions “above” his firm and with entities in a pre-institutional phase, as is the case of his own firm situated “below” him, and still “beside” similar firms, as during the incubation period. Consequently, his degree of discretion had great variation, from reciprocal influence within a process of social construction to acquiescence of institutional determination, through relationships with apparently objectified institutions which, however, were open to influence.
