Clay Shirky on "the logic of collective action"

I found a recording of that AllVoices webinar I keep talking about!

http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/5922157-allvoices-hosts-online-symposium-with-clay-shirky

At 2 minutes and 40 seconds into the recording, Clay Shirky is talking about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Ram_Sena??and their Valentine's Day threat; those fighting against it wanted to defy the warning??in response but faced a challenge because, Shirky says:

"...the logic of collective action has historically been that people opt out because they don't know if they're going to be coordinated enough to act as a group"

Can anyone give me some information on "the logic of collective action" and what experience/studies/papers/books/writings would indicate this "opt out" tendency?

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