Although this book is complex and multifaceted, there is one central argument running through it. This argument consists of the claim that consumption practices can be understood as political practices, and that such consumption practices are significant for societal development. For example, when a woman goes to the supermarket to buy shampoo, she can choose to buy the one with an environmentally friendly label, thus supporting policies of sustainability. The author sees the phenomenon of political consumerism as a reaction to the derooting of politics from the context of the nation-state into more microlocal as well as more global contexts, and she develops her own concept for defining political consumerism as political participation, namely, individualized collective action.

The book is organized in five chapters. The first and most theoretical chapter argues in depth why social science should work with political consumerism as phenomenon. The chapter gives an overview of the various approaches within political science, sociology, and business studies that attempt to coin a new conception of politics in the wake of the debates about globalization and localization. It is argued why consumption seen as politics theoretically can be justified: Consumerism can be used by ordinary consumers to express political preferences, and the workings of the market provide tools for such expressions—boycotts and positive buying. Furthermore, consumption is already political because products are political, and consumerism can influence the agenda of other actors and institutions in society, like any other type of civic participation. Thus, the author states that consumerism can imply political agency, and that this agency entails the drawing on private as well as public virtues. The crux of this argument is the development of the author's own concept, individualized collective action, formulated as an ideal type for political consumption practices and juxtaposed with a conceptualization of more traditional civic engagement, called collectivist collective action.

The remaining four chapters exemplify the complex argumentation in Chapter 1. The second chapter deals with different historical forms of political consumerism. The third chapter provides an overview and discussion of contemporary types of political consumerism. The fourth chapter describes and interprets one particular empirical example of political consumerism—the Swedish case of the eco-label “Good Environmental Choice”—underlining the point that political consumerism is not just about how consumers shop but also about the societal configurations of actors and institutions for each political issue of which consumers form a part. Finally, Chapter 5 returns to the question of public and private virtues in political consumerism and links these with the concept of social capital, stating that political consumerism both needs and generates social capital.

In my view, Political Virtue and Shopping is an absolutely necessary book in the areas of political participation and consumer politics. The book provides several important contributions to the current debates in these fields and will be of use for many different types of studies and research.

First and foremost, this book contributes a conceptual development much needed in the area of new types of political participation. There have not been many comprehensive attempts to grasp individual consumer strategy theoretically. Michele Micheletti's concept of individual collective action categorizes the significant characteristics about consumerism as political activity in a way that makes us understand how shopping as politics both is different from other types of civic engagements and at the same time displays sufficient common ground with such other types as to be rendered political. The strength of the author's conceptualization of political consumerism is that it combines the ability to work as an empirically oriented conceptual tool with a more general theoretical grounding of her concept by placing the phenomenon of political consumerism in its complex societal configurations.

The book also represents a useful overview of a variety of debates relevant for the study of civic engagement and political participation. In this realm, the author gives a constructive contribution as the accounts and arguments appear systematic and balanced, so that her own position is not established via a shooting down of other positions but via a positive dialogue. In this connection, another strength of the book is that the overviews touch upon a number of classical social scientific discussions, such as private versus public and actor structure configurations, and this might also generate more general interest outside the circles of political sociology.

In many ways, a major strength of the book is its broad perspective. However, there is one point where the broadness tends to go too far for my political sociologist likings. It is a distinct argument of the author that political consumerism blurs the boundaries of what is considered private and what is considered public, and that it is this mixture of consumers drawing upon both private and public virtues in their political practices that gives political consumerism its unique status as a participation type (pp. 18–24). I agree that it makes sense to define political consumerism as based on a mixture of privately and publicly oriented motives. But such a definition at the same time makes it incredibly difficult for researchers to categorize and measure when a consumer action or a set of practices should be understood as political, especially if researchers do not work with qualitative methods. Moreover, although theoretically there is such a weight on including consumers' private interests as legitimate political virtues, at several places in the book, the assumption still appears to be that for consumerism to work as political strategy, public virtues (p. 154) and collectivist collective action (p. 22) are necessary.

But this minor critique in no way questions the overall academic virtues of the book as well researched, exciting to read, and contributing constructively to theory development in the fields of political participation, new conceptions of politics, and consumer studies. Shop for this book and participate!