Andrew McFarland's book is one part political theory and another part American government, with a dash of international relations and social movements scholarship. McFarland is a longtime observer of grassroots advocacy, particularly in the United States. His interest in the topic appears to be driven by a normative concern that individuals and groups seeking to promote the general good (“commonweal” concerns) are often too diffuse (“scattered”) to exercise influence over parochial special interests. Because their concerns are blocked, such groups need to engage in “creative participation” in political life through “civic innovation,” what the author calls “new modes of cooperation to obtain a public good” (p. 5).

McFarland seeks to apply these insights to a range of subjects and countries, including environmental protection, anticorruption, and politically driven consumer choices in the United States, Europe, and China. Boycotts and Dixie Chicks is too short to call these case studies or theory testing. Indeed, he largely relies (indeed overrelies) on a handful of secondary sources and reinterprets other scholars' work in the language of creative participation, civic innovation, scattered populace, and commonweal goals.

The application to a wide variety of issue arenas provides a window into an intriguing set of topics. In an effort to identify civic engagement against corruption, Chapter 3 examines both the Progressive movement in Wisconsin in the late nineteenth century and contemporary protest activity in China. Chapters 4 and 5 cover a variety of ways in which consumers are making political choices, including boycotts of firms and individuals for socially undesirable behavior (such as the boycott of ExxonMobil for antienvironmental practices), as well as “buycotts” where consumers make purchases to support their social and political objectives.

In an effort to show that not all campaigns are left-leaning, McFarland also includes the consumer boycott of the country artists the Dixie Chicks (hence the book's title) in response to their public opposition to US President George W. Bush in the lead-up to the 2003 Iraq war. For those interested in transnational consumer choices to support ethical or “fair trade” coffee, there is a section in Chapter 6 that reviews the history of the movement, and Chapter 5 reviews some survey evidence of politically driven consumer purchases in different, mostly European, countries.

Try as it might, the book does not successfully weave these disparate topics together. Part of the problem is organizational, as the author jumps around to cover environmental protection, corruption, and political consumerism, sometimes in the same chapter.

The book also stumbles conceptually. While each chapter tries to label and work in the author's favored neologisms to describe the topics, the efforts are somewhat perfunctory and strained. In describing a 1970s-era boycott of the Swiss firm Nestlé for its marketing of baby milk to women in developing countries, McFarland writes: “The Nestlé boycott can be considered creative participation as civic innovation. In this instance, scattered people concerned about an injustice initially lacked established institutions for public action…. Religion and humanitarian activists succeeded in creating vehicles for transnational action” (p. 112). In describing the Dixie Chicks boycott, he writes that it “serves as an example of political consumerism, hence, of creative participation” (p. 75).

These passages sound fine but rely on problematic concepts. Both the words “innovation” and “creative” imply some degree of novelty, of forms of political engagement that are somehow unfamiliar, and that we need a new conceptual lexicon to understand these forms of political behavior. I was not sure, however, why the terminology of social movements was not up to the task of encompassing this political activity. The author differentiates creative participation and civic innovation from typical political participation through political parties, interest groups, face-to-face civic engagement, and social movements.

Because McFarland sees social movements as challenging existing institutions, he thinks it necessary to coin “creative participation” as a new concept for groups that use nontraditional tactics to defend the status quo. In contrast to creative participation, in Table 1.1 (p. 10) he also represents social movements as low in both “scattered people” and “commonweal goals,” as if social movements tend to represent highly concentrated movements pursuing narrow parochial interests. I am not convinced either is true or if McFarland's nomenclature is all that useful. For example, he prefers the term “commonweal” goals to avoid “moralistic” language of the “common good” (p. 4), but it is difficult to see how “creative” and “innovative” are not unencumbered with similar normative biases.

Indeed, McFarland wants to be ecumenical in his choice of cases, but save for the titular boycott, all the other cases in the book represent campaigns that are similar in ideological orientation, largely a response to globalization and the capture of politics by corporate and special interests. His true purpose, revealed in the last few pages, is to describe and herald the emergence of this kind of “neo-Progressive” mobilization (p. 145) around the world, whether by the likes of the Occupy Movement (which occurred after this book was written) or by Chinese peasants or via the World Social Forum. The Dixie Chicks case seems a bit out of place in this wider normative project.

The first-generation literature on social movements, such as Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink's magisterial work Activists Beyond Borders (1998), sought to demonstrate that transnational advocacy movements were meaningful political actors. In a 2003 article in World Politics, Richard Price suggested that the next generation of scholarship on the topic needed to answer the question “Why do some campaigns succeed in some places but fail in others”? (“Transnational Civil Society and Advocacy in World Politics,” World Politics 55 [July 2003]: 579–606.) The literature has largely taken up that charge. Boycotts and Dixie Chicks would have profited from more engagement with this line of scholarship on consumer boycotts and labeling schemes by such scholars as Brayden King and Tim Bartley. For readers interested in a wide sweep of history and cross-cutting comparisons, Charles Tilly's Social Movements, 1768–2004 (2004) has much to recommend.

McFarland's work is a return to an earlier era when scholars were attempting to describe the landscape of new actors engaging in untraditional political behavior. Although drawing attention to the parallels between anticorruption activities in nineteenth-century Wisconsin and contemporary China is useful, a far more important contribution would come from understanding the conditions under which these diverse efforts succeed and fail.

For readers, particularly undergraduates, less familiar with some of these historical episodes or the wider literature on collective action and civic mobilization, this book does serve a useful introduction and summarizes findings in the field.