The article focuses on the relevance of social representations as a mediation between the institutionalized knowledge about strategies and the re-meanings attributted to this knowledge in the organizational routine. The research carried out with small business men, by using the ethnographic method, the systematic and participative observation and real-life tales, revealed that strategy, as a concept determining courses of action primarily aimed at maintenance and consequent expansion of the business, is re-meant through the mediation of the violence that crosses the context investigated.
Strategy; social representations; ethnography; small firms