The audience for this book is described as ‘students of sociology, political science, and communications studies’ and it is also stated that the book provides a ‘framework for evaluating the role of civic associations in social and political life, as well as in their own lives as citizens’. The author is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California and so the book inevitably draws on the North American experience. However, I neither think that it makes the book any less relevant for the type of student described who is pursuing their studies outside the US, nor is it a book that should be seen as having its place only on an undergraduate reading list. In fact, I think this is a useful book for students on all sorts of courses and I would love my first year undergraduate business students to read it to help them reflect upon the place of active citizenship in their own lives. But, the book is written in a scholarly, informing and engaging style that would make it also of interest to a wider readership than students. Those interested in civil society, the voluntary sector and volunteering would find this of interest. And I say that because, although volunteering touches many areas, it can become a little isolated. The key thing about this book is that it reminds us that volunteering is political.

In the UK, we have become used to the idea of volunteering being presented in a support role to welfare. That may seem unfair when the ‘Big Society’, in so far as people pin it down, calls for community participation in all sorts of ways; but the fact remains that the general direction of travel is for volunteering to increasingly be seen as ‘paid work without pay’ and its instrumental role as something ‘for your CV’, or as a ‘way back into paid work’. In turn, this leads to research that tends to concentrate on how to recruit, manage and retain volunteers. Don't get me wrong – that is needed. The oft quoted 1997 National Survey of Volunteering, which showed that 71 per cent of volunteers said that their work could be better organised, can be seen as a root cause of a more considered programme towards improvement in volunteer management (Howlett, Reference Howlett2011). But at the same time, the over emphasis on this leads to a managerial approach that means much of the thinking on volunteering is influenced by organisational psychology and an obsession with motivations and the search for ‘best management practice’. To an extent, we can see a change in this – my own efforts with Colin Rochester and Angela Ellis Paine (Rochester et al., Reference Rochester, Ellis Paine and Howlett2012) argued that the work place model impoverishes volunteering, while Rochester's Rediscovering Voluntary Action: The Beat of a Different Drum (Reference Rochester2013) is a fascinating account of how voluntary action in the UK has been sliding into the idea that its main thrust is supporting welfare organisations.

This book, alongside Rochester’s, helps provide a counter-weight, and, although it is undergraduate orientated, there is enough here to help those who want to emphasise the political nature of voluntary action (the terms are important and we need to be careful when we use that, or volunteering, or civic participation). Eliasoph approaches the subject critically, and again this will chime with emerging views on the direction of voluntary action and volunteering such as the National Coalition for Independent Action which provides a valuable voice against the ‘marketisation’ of voluntary action.

Through six linked chapters, Eliasoph takes us on a journey that encourages us not to always see volunteering as beyond criticism. The chapter on volunteering versus political activism begins to sketch how well meaning volunteering that helps ‘one person at a time’ is only a partial understanding of what volunteering is and can achieve. Tocqueville makes an expected appearance in discussing civic engagement and through him and the perhaps less well-known Jane Addams and Emma Goldman, Eliasoph shows how voluntary action and participation can achieve change and how civic acts can transform into ‘bigger’ politics. Indeed, in the second chapter this is spelt out more through urging volunteering to see problems to be fixed as ones of justice and how volunteering needs to connect the dots. At the same time, the warning is not to see the picture as so big and difficult that action becomes transfixed on the little questions that we spend time debating to make us feel as though we are participating, but which will, actually, have little consequence. This is good stuff – a ‘text book’ that outlines ideas in an easy-to-understand way, but is also urging that volunteering can really make a difference.

Subsequent chapters deal with the relationship between the state and civic engagement and a compelling argument is made for a fruitful co-existence where substituting one for the other is so much less effective than a balanced tripod of state, market and civil society. The thorny issue of when volunteering through non-governmental organisations (NGOs) has a deleterious effect is also examined and provides a spring-board into discussion of cultural relativism, while the extent to which inequalities are exacerbated by voluntary action is something not shied away from.

For me, as someone who researchers volunteering, I often found that I didn't recognise parts of the book – ‘where was the volunteering?’ Then I realised that maybe I too have strayed too far down a path that has a rather simple, and to my shame, managerial view of volunteering, and reading this book gave me pause for thought. For that, I am happy to say, at the very least, this book deserves a place on reading lists to get students thinking more widely about the world they live in.