What does /usr/sbin/install really do?

Question

I'm trying to install discount on my VPS which is based on Solaris and compiling works great after setting some environment variables but the install fails.

So I thought I'd do the install manually, but what does install really do? Is it simply a mv followed by a chmod? Is it magic? That error seems to show that it attempts to do a lot of searching for files all over?

Can I just copy the binary, library and header files as usual?

Googling "install" doesn't give me much relevant information so I appreciate any clarification I can get!