There is perhaps no more potent picture of globalization than the transnational circulation of consumer products like Coke and Pepsi, which somehow manage to condense far-reaching anxieties and debates about the presumed spread of a Western monoculture into every can. Soft drinks thus offer Robert J. Foster a privileged window onto an array of processes now glossed as globalization, including “the cross-cultural consumption of branded commodities, the business operations of transnational corporations, and the new forms of corporate and consumer citizenship taking shape in and against these operations” (p. xiv). The wide-ranging analysis that results is incisive, original, and highly engaging.

By tracking what he terms “cola connections” (ix), Foster sets out to illuminate dispersed and heterogeneous networks held together by a commodity in motion. The book joins a growing body of literature that follows the social lives of circulating products, but readers familiar with the genre will find more ethnographic substance and theoretical sophistication to savor in Coca-Globalization than in many other commodity biographies. Traversing sites across space and time, the study moves from the corporate arenas in which changing business and advertising strategies have been developed, to moments of cola consumption in the Papua New Guinea Highlands, to new modes of activism exhibited at annual shareholder meetings of the Coca-Cola Company. Through such forays, we come to appreciate how the officials of multilocal multinationals, not unlike everyday consumers, grapple with questions of universality and particularism as they strive to alternatively embed and disembed colas in different worlds of meaning.

Key to Foster's analysis is a point that has been made to less academic ends by the likes of soft-drink industry executives themselves: that people are increasingly connected to one another through brand-name consumer products (63). Foster shows that value in both commercial and semiotic terms is created through the efforts of those amid such networks to make “worldly things at home” (xiii). Further, he extends Daniel Miller's notion of consumption work to argue that consumers' labor in particular is often appropriated to expand the value of the corporate brand. As Foster contends, it is precisely because branded products are molded through their meanings—by, as he describes it, ever-shifting alignments and disjunctures in the networks of perspectives of diverse producers and consumers—that the management of commodity connections becomes so consequential, and emerges as a new arena for political action by corporations and consumers alike. Skillfully navigating the pitfalls of reading soft drinks as either a pat story of unmitigated coca-colonization on the one hand or autonomous local resistance on the other, Foster presents a persuasive case for both the openness and the constraints of the processes he traces.

The first four chapters of the book address the exercise and exploitation of efforts to endow soft drinks with meaning; the last three look more closely at the politics of consumption this has made possible. While Foster attributes the most salient transformative potential to forms of shareholder activism like initiatives for improved worker rights, wages, and health care, he is quick to note that this mode of consumer democracy tends to result in a sort of “marketplace haggling” between unequals, with “the used-car lot rather than the town square as its model” (208). Although the book's focus on consumer meanings motivates its important discussion of citizenship and governance, Foster's insistence on positing consumption work as both wholly distinct from “productive (manufacturing) labor” and far more central to the commercial value of globally branded goods (231) forecloses a potentially fruitful analysis of how materials and manufacturing may transform in tandem with brand meanings. These considerations perhaps lie beyond the compass of Foster's tightly argued contribution, but they are nevertheless suggested by the very cola connections it so strikingly brings to the fore.