Creating institutions

a study on the regulatory framework for brazilian artisanal cachaça production

Abstract

This study was developed through the theoretical lens of Institutional Work, which seeks to investigate how actors can create, maintain, or disrupt institutions. Focusing on the creation of institutions, its objective was to recover the historical aspects that fostered the development of legal standardization rules for Brazilian artisanal cachaça, emphasizing its particularities as well as its normative, regulatory, and sociocultural orientations. To achieve this objective, a qualitative and descriptive research approach was employed, using in-depth interviews and document analysis as methods for data collection. As the main findings and conclusions, it was possible to identify the mobilization of different actors toward a reordering of the field, highlighting an effort to create institutions and practices that promote a genuinely Brazilian identity for cachaça. Additionally, there is a noticeable attempt to address issues such as informality and to professionalize the production of the spirit through the development of specific rules and standards, based on mimetic processes. The study also revealed the political difficulty of differentiating between artisanal and industrial cachaça.