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The purpose of this paper is to offer some insight into how siblings aged between 4 and 12, engaged in a collaborative drawing activity at home, recall the shopping trips they have experienced.

Using a Vygotskian perspective, the data collection consisted of engaging 15 pairs of siblings in the production of a joint drawing of a shop of their choice. Drawing in pairs opens a Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky, 1978) where the younger child benefits from verbal guidance by the older one to achieve the common task. This situation enables the researcher to gain close access to children’s knowledge about stores and to the words they use to describe their personal shopping experiences.

This exploratory research reveals some constitutive elements of children’s “shopscapes” (Nicol, 2014), i.e. the imaginary geographies they actively elaborate through their daily practices and experiences with regard to retail environments. In their communicative interactions when elaborating a joint drawing of the shop they have chosen, children demonstrate that they master a considerable body of knowledge about retail environments. Surprisingly, recalling their shopping practices sheds light on various anxiety-generating dimensions.

The data collection is based on a remembering exercise performed at home and does not bring information about what children actually do in retail environments. Moreover, the children were asked to focus on buying a present for a friend’s birthday, therefore the information gathered essentially relates to toy stores.

This research underlines the necessity for retailers to endeavour to reduce some of the anxious feelings depicted and verbalized by children, by improving the welcome for children into their stores.

There are also opportunities for retailers to invest in the consumption education area by guiding young visitors so that they learn how to behave as apprentice consumers in retail outlets.

The child-centric perspective of the study reveals new and surprising insights about the way children report their memorised shopping experiences.

This paper seeks to conceptualize the field of child and teen consumption as a system of social practices at the cross roads of six strongly intermingled subsystems covering social, institutional, technological, narrative, economic, and political stakes. Children's and teens' consumption is shaped and transformed by a mix of managerial action, public policy, cycles of technological change, the evolution of related institutions like parenthood and schooling, changing cultural references, values, modes of socialization as well as by the actions of children and teens themselves.

Within such a framework, child and teen consumption appears as a complex arena of competing moral and ideological perspectives. In such a volatile context, forms of resistance to ideologies of unending consumption emerge, continuously calling into question the responsibility of business for unwanted long‐term effects.

The five papers included in this special issue shed light on the complexities of marketing to children by successively exploring the contradictions within the individual, managerial, professional, corporate, and institutional levels. As a direct consequence, the notions of “corporate social responsibility” and “corporate social responsiveness” towards childhood are also constantly evolving concepts which are quite difficult to grasp.

The paper attempts to design a transformative research agenda to promote socially responsible marketing practices and ethically embedded theoretical frameworks. It also stands as an invitation to deepen the indispensable dialogue – albeit often demanding for both sides – between marketing practitioners and social scientists aimed at constantly redefining the moving outline of corporate social responsibility in contemporary children‐oriented markets.

From an interpretive semiology perspective this paper examines the meaning suggested by the absence of children in newspaper advertisements, commercial websites and catalogue images of children’s furniture manufacturers. The purpose of the paper is to highlight the multilayered process involved in conveying meaning to the “parent-child cluster” consumer through press and online advertisements designed by children’s furniture manufacturers.

A corpus of 200 press advertisements and catalogues produced by children's furniture manufacturers (particularly IKEA and Gautier) was analysed using a combination of Barthes’ (1964) visual analysis and Greimas’ (1987) narrative approach to visual discourses.

The scenes portrayed to shape the message addressed to the “parent-child cluster“ consumer, suggest that, in addition to fostering positive values such as self-fulfilment and stimulating background for an active child, they also promote discourses about contemporary childhood and parenthood.

This paper highlights how furniture retailers through the figurative choices they make to portray a child bedroom and to organize a series of child bedroom images within a catalogue, generate a brand discourse aiming to typify representations of childhood imbued with diverse cognitive, social and emotional dimensions within diverse cultural backgrounds.

This article aims to highlight the need to explore the concept of social responsibility at the very heart of research activity. Questioning the social responsibility of research activities in management provides the opportunity to take a fresh look at the criteria used to assess its usefulness.

Drawing on a secondary analysis of a longitudinal research process, this paper emphasizes the importance of achieving an ongoing co-monitoring of the issues about social responsibility involved in research.

This reflection leads to a first characterization of two key dimensions of the societal responsibility of researchers in management: their professional responsibility and their institutional responsibility.

It is meant to encourage researchers to design a relevant instrumentation to help them negotiate, make explicit and co-monitor the issues of social responsibility involved in their empirical investigations as well as in their theoretical elaborations.

As research projects are socially situated activities, always infused with values and ideologies, it is crucial that researchers reflect upon the axiology guiding their empirical and theoretical work.

In order to achieve an ongoing co-monitoring of the issues about social responsibility involved in management research, the article suggests a heuristic deviated use of the balanced scorecard.

Marketers have increased decision‐making responsibility when they work either directly or indirectly with children and adolescents; a vulnerable sector of the population. These young consumers are the target of much‐criticised practices. The objective of this paper is to lay the foundations of a code of ethics for the marketing industry.

First, the stakes for marketers are outlined, in addition to an overview of the epistemological and historic foundations of the marketing discipline; materialism, pragmatic utilitarianism and liberalist individialism.

Finds that each of these concepts is subject to allegations of suspicious and outright immoral marketing practices.

The paper gives food for thought on morality, professional deontology, ethics and individual decision‐making responsibility. This code of ethics is designed to serve as a pragmatic paradigm and it is destined for marketers who are both decision‐makers and social stakeholders.

This paper aims to understand, from a theoretical standpoint and from an empirical perspective, why food products can be designed and perceived as “playful” and “funny”. Drawing on the experiential framework developed in marketing research and recent advances in theories of play, it seeks to clarify the conceptual articulation of “play” with “fun” and it seeks to highlight the need to reconsider the contribution of the product in framing situations that children experience as “playful” and “fun”.

The paper focuses on qualitative data gathered through a combination of observations and in‐depth interviews of 14 dyads “child‐mother” confronted by four product innovations at a prototype stage, and a series of eight focus groups involving children from three to eight years old as well as their mothers.

Children were very able to categorize food products by appreciating their different degrees of fun. The study led to the identification and coding of 13 key dimensions associated with “playfulness” and “fun” in a food product.

The paper offers a heuristic operational tool to guide marketing managers and R&D teams in their exploration and testing of the possibilities/impossibilities in the association of “playfulness” and “fun” with food products aimed at children.

The research demonstrates that some dimensions which characterize play cannot be directly applied to food products, and differentiates “playful” from “fun” by considering the intensity of the social interaction being developed through the food product or food consumption situation.