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This article seeks to make a critical contribution to the contemporary debate on the active role of children as consumers, exploring the different meanings children confer on consumer goods and spaces in retail settings.

A total of 60 children were unobtrusively observed in ten Italian apparel stores.

Children tend to subvert the stores' possible uses and symbolizations by actively re‐appropriating the meanings of products, promotional stimuli and spaces through play.

The analysis of children's lived experience of commercial spaces enables retailers to adjust the stores' environment to children's demands, recognising their role as active meaning creators.

The playful re‐appropriation of spaces, products and promotional stimuli emerged as a mechanism through which children learn to consume, reinforcing their knowledge and attitudes about retail settings, products and brands.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the role of creative re-appropriation of goods, symbols, and other manifestations of the dominant material culture in the Emo subculture identity construction process.

The authors conducted an ethnographic study on a purposive sample of social networks, blogs, discussion forums and online platforms for images sharing. Verbatim and visual texts as photos, drawings and moodboards were qualitatively content analysed in order to understand the network of meanings underlying the ambiguous amalgam of signs composing the Emo style.

Consistent with the literature, the qualitative content analysis of texts, images, videos, drawings and other forms of fan art typical of this micro culture revealed four key areas of semantic value: the aestheticization of inner pain, the sense of alienation and isolation from socio-cultural mainstream, the search for authenticity, and the need for emotional connection.

The research followed a quite new research method, the netnographic approach, originally developed to analyse brand communities.

Emo creative practices of re-appropriation of goods, symbols and icons of the dominant culture reveal a subtle message of protest against the consumer society and the commodification of everyday life.

The paper presents the deconstruction of Emo Lifestyle and Aesthetics analysing the system of meanings underneath the rituals Emos share through the Web.

The purpose of this paper is to explore children’s responses to store atmosphere, and the role of parent-child interaction in these responses.

The authors used a qualitative study within two French stores and employed a grounded-theory approach to analyse data. Data were collected from 41 in-store observations and 20 in-depth interviews with children aged 7-11.

This research reveals that the impact of store atmospherics on children’s responses to store environment and on their behaviour in-store is a complex phenomenon. Children passively and actively respond to store atmosphere. They appropriate and re-appropriate store environment for their own goal of play. Store atmospherics may lead to positive outcomes in the form of children’s exploration of the store, desire to stay longer and intention to revisit. However, store atmosphere can also become the source of conflicts between parents and children, and therefore have a negative impact on children’s behaviour in-store.

The study deepens the understanding of children’s responses to store atmosphere by taking account of parent-child interaction. It extends research on the effects of store atmosphere on children’s behaviour by suggesting the moderating effect of parent-child conflict. Nevertheless, the number of stores selected limits the findings.

The findings of this study enable retailers to improve the atmosphere of their stores by making it fun and creative in order to attract children to play there. Furthermore, the study provides interesting findings for retailers on how to overcome the challenge of inappropriate store atmosphere creating or aggravating parent-child conflict during shopping trips.

The authors suggest solving conflicts between children and parents through common activities within the store or through interactive technologies that favour communication and enable children to learn through play.

The originality of this paper lies in its focus on the role of parent-child interaction in children’s responses to store atmosphere. The authors intend to reveal the complicated relationship between store atmosphere, children’s responses and parent-child interaction in-store.

This paper aims to explore brand rhythm in a lyrical analysis. It aims to provide insights into the appropriation of temporal meaning in material, collective and individual contexts.

The design offers a structured advance in lyrical qualitative research and the complementary third alternative to story and drama as more frequent representational forms in interpretive projects. This project presents an aesthetic performance in the sequential constructs of mimesis, poiesis and kinesis.

The inquiry confirms the paradoxical evolution of a brand’s temporal aspects and the importance of rhythm perception as a performative act of semantic bootstrapping and evolving brand meaning in general.

This project shows the importance of brand rhythm and pace in a triangulated methodological sequence of poetic perspectives as an advance of the current qualitative poetic state of play in research. It has implications for the strategic style management of brands in general.

This paper proposes the importance of brand rhythm as a differentiating attribute. The project presents a repeatable case study which depicts managers a structured poetic approach to capture the temporal essence of brands.

This project is situated in the context of an area that has become to be known as the Timeless Land. The artistic (re-)appropriation of a temporal aspect has had an impact on the development of public attitudes and policy.

This project offers new insights into the temporal aspects of brands and the construct of brand rhythm in particular. It completes Altieri’s three literary approaches in a performative inquiry. The proposition of the lyrical third way in a theoretical framework should facilitate the acceptance and increasing currency of future poetic projects in marketing.

Information science research has begun to broaden its traditional focus on information seeking to cover other modes of acquiring information. The purpose of this paper is to move forward on this trajectory and to present a framework for explicating how in addition to being sought, existing information are made useful and taken into use.

A conceptual enquiry draws on an empirical vignette based on an observation study of an archaeological teaching excavation. The conceptual perspective builds on Andersen’s genre approach and Huvila’s notion of situational appropriation.

This paper suggests that information becomes appropriable, and appropriated (i.e. taken into use), when informational and social genres intertwine with each other. This happens in a continuous process of (re)appropriation of information where existing information scaffolds new information and the on-going process of appropriation.

The approach is proposed as a potentially powerful conceptualisation for explicating information interactions when existing information is taken into use rather than sought that have received little attention in traditional models and theories of human information behaviour.

This study seeks to show that children are not passive consumers, rather that they have a reflexive attitude towards their eating practice and the ability to override food‐use rules invented by the manufacturers.

Drawing on an ethnographic survey conducted among families with children aged from six to 12, the paper will seek to show, from the child's point of view, why fun products, which at first sight are so beguiling, are not in fact much fun when used. From the observations made of the children's eating practices with regard to specific fun foods, and from interviews with the children on these, it emerges that these foods give the child little scope for deciding how to eat them.

Over the years, there has appeared on the market a range of fun food products for which clear instructions are given on how children should eat and play with them. Despite copy, produced with the young consumer in mind, and carefully defined product affordance, consumer practice is far removed from what the product designers expect. For children, however, deviating from prescribed use and re‐appropriating products with their own “art of doing” or food‐use techniques are key elements of their eating practice.

Most of the studies on that topic are centred on fun food manufacturers and industry. The most original aspect of this study is to focus on the children's representations, discourses and practices. Thus it provides a new aspect on fun food consumption.

An intentional meander around the central issue of servicescapes design. Proposes that there are worthwhile lessons to be learned from the way in which users divert and subvert the planned design of physical support. Advocates that servicescape is not only acting on users in order to achieve marketing goals, but also it is acted on by users in order to frame existential goals. In this constructivist approach, the consumer is considered as a co‐builder of the servicescape. While experiencing service, the consumer can create new meanings and unusual functions which could raise opportunities to improve service management.

Often linked to the New Public Management (NPM) doctrines, agencification has been on the priority list of policy makers for over two decades. This article proposes an analysis of the role of agencies in the French health system and the impact of government agency reform on physicians and the public.

The research analyzes the perceived implementation of a re-concentration of decision-making powers within public agencies as the declared goal of agencification at the French health care system, specifically primary care providers and hospitals. The assessment relies on secondary sources from ministerial bodies such as the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs, the Ministry of Labor, the Social Security and the General Accounting Office, and specialized French technical agencies.

Decentralization in France and the subsequent rise of public health care agencies had outcomes below expectations. Hence, a re-concentration of decision-making powers within the larger Regional Health Agencies; a streamlining of the public administration; and a re-appropriation of decision-making powers by the Ministry of Health are needed. The monitoring of health providers allows central health authorities to govern at a distance.

The analysis of health care agencies in France and of their use of efficiency-enhancing techniques may trigger a change of values within the medical profession.

This paper aims to examine the experience of women entrepreneurs and the challenges and issues they face in reconciling the work activities of the family sphere with those of the entrepreneurial sphere.

This study is based on a materialist feminist perspective and a theory of living work that take into account the visible and invisible dimensions of the real work performed by women entrepreneurs. The methodology is based on a qualitative research design involving individual and group interviews conducted with 70 women entrepreneurs.

The results show the various individual and collective strategies deployed by women entrepreneurs to reconcile the work activities of the family and entrepreneurial spheres.

One of the major findings emerging from the results of this study relates to the re-appropriation of the world of work and organization of work by women entrepreneurs and its emancipatory potential for the division of labour. Through the authority and autonomy they possessed as business owners, and with their employees’ cooperation, they integrated and internalized tasks related to the work activities of the family sphere into the organization of work itself. Thus, not only new forms of work organization and cooperation at work but also new ways of conceiving of entrepreneurship as serving women’s life choices and emancipation could be seen to be emerging.

This paper presents an alternative, “Latin” vision of our societies. Here the urgent societal issue is not to celebrate freedom from social constraints, but to re‐establish communal embeddedness. The citizen of 2002 is less interested in the objects of consumption than in the social links and identities that come with them. This Latin view holds that people like to gather together in tribes and that such social, proximate communities are more affective and influential on people’s behaviour than either marketing institutions or other “formal” cultural authorities. There is also an element of resistance and re‐appropriation in the acts of being, gathering and experiencing together. This view of the shared experience of tribes sets it apart from both Northern notions of segmented markets and one‐to‐one relationships. In this Latin view, the effective marketing of 2002 and beyond is not to accept and exploit consumers in their contemporary individualisation, as Northern approaches might. Rather the future of marketing is in offering and supporting a renewed sense of community. Marketing becomes tribal marketing. In a marketing profession challenged by the Internet phenomenon, tribal marketing is by no means just another passing fad but a Trojan horse to induce companies to take on board the re‐emergence of the quest for community.