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This chapter explores the concept of market infrastructure, which is tentatively defined as a materially heterogeneous arrangement that silently supports and structures the consummation of market exchanges. Specifically, the authors investigate the enactment of market infrastructure in the US grocery retail sector by exploring how barcodes and related devices contributed to modify its market infrastructure during the period 1967–2010. Combining this empirical case with insights from previous research, the authors propose that market infrastructures are relational, available for use, modular, actively maintained, interdependent, commercial, emergent and political. The authors argue that this conception of market infrastructure provides a powerful tool for unveiling the complex agencements and engineering efforts that underpin seemingly superficial, individual and isolated market exchanges.

This paper seeks to investigate how fun food products are marketed in a French chain of supermarkets. It aims to deal with the difficulty in marketing a fun food product in an environment that is not children‐friendly.

The research rests on a case study, conducted through interviews, observations, and photographs.

The paper shows that, despite the lack of consideration for children in supermarket settings, the private brand of the chain, given its control on the entire distribution system, manages to invent a kind of fun merchandising.

This is an exploratory case study that would need further research in other chains and/or other countries.

The paper shows the importance of merchandising, beyond the mere design of products. This neglected dimension could be of interest for regulators as well as professionals.

Research on child consumption focuses more on the products, packaging or advertising than on their immediate market environment. This paper helps to bring a better balance between these different dimensions, as well as an understanding of the importance of their articulation.

This paper aims to explore the sociological process behind the development of the American Marketing Association (AMA). It shows how the shift from isolated endeavors to an organized movement happened in marketing, how and why marketing pioneers merged to build a professional body and what this body provided to its community and to society at large.

This paper studies the history of the AMA from the perspective of the sociology of science and relies on the marketing literature and other written sources.

The paper shows that the AMA is both the result and the center of a coupling procedure. Isolated pioneers in the marketing field found it useful to communicate with those who were engaged in endeavors similar to their own. The meeting resulted in a dialog, and the dialog had necessitated the establishment of the AMA as a common reference point. The AMA provided the marketing community with a language and an institution that could help them to exist and move forward together.

This paper provides an up to date account of the history of the AMA as well as a sociological analysis of its development.

Based on the work of leading French and emerging French social scientists, this paper attempts to reactivate the field of Consumer Culture Theory throughout the proposal of alternative notional tools.

This paper takes a conceptual orientation that is based on the selection and organization of concepts, methodologies, and insights borrowed from French philosophers and social scientists.

The paper first points out the various French thought styles. Next, it highlights key intellectual ideas in French intellectual tradition that have arisen over the last 30 years and promote their implications for possible future researches on consumption and for a better political activism which would give more voice to consumption studies.

The paper attempts to categorize with a semiotic methodology, the panorama of French thought styles and proposes new concepts and angles to refound the analysis of consumption. Based on the questioning on common categories of CCT, it proposes original ideas, methods, and concepts borrowed from the French tradition to break up conventional and ethnocentric approaches by considering consumption beyond the sheer notion of culture.

This paper aims to provide an overview over the development of historical research into advertising from the early twentieth century. Its main purposes are to interest marketing scholars and business historians in the history of advertising, help scholars that are unfamiliar with the field in choosing an appropriate theoretical and methodological angle, and provide a critique of a range of methods and theoretical approaches being applied in advertising historical research.

The research design of this paper is based on historiographical analysis and method critique. It surveys the advertising historical literature of the three decades between 1980 and 2010, and it compares and contrasts dominant research methodologies and theoretical paradigms that have been used by historians and advertising researchers.

Much advertising historical research is based on a specific set of theoretical paradigms (“Modernization”, “Americanization”, and “Semiotics”), without being aware of the manifest impact they have on the narratives and understandings that historians create. Identifying these paradigms and outlining their impact will help marketing historians and advertising researchers to avoid the pitfalls associated with particular paradigms.

This paper subjects the modern historiography of advertising to a methodological and narratological analysis. It uses this analysis to propose new and somewhat more critical directions in advertising historical research.