The search environment is not (always) benign: reassessing the risks of organizational search

March and Simon’s (1958: 50) assumption that search happens within a “benign environment” has become taken-for-granted in organizational studies. The implications of making this assumption are not widely theorized, investigated, or even discussed, and yet, it often appears to have been unwittingly imported into explanations of organizational learning. March and Simon acknowledged that this assumption was not realistic—our work builds on theirs by investigating the origins and consequences of a non-benign search environment. We draw on in-depth qualitative research at a Fortune 500 mining firm to show how perceptions of social risk problematize the assumption of a benign search environment. Causal links are drawn between role equivalence, performance comparisons, and rivalry for social status to explain how social risk is generated and why it can lead actors to view the intraorganizational search environment as non-benign. These perceptions help create what we describe as a “paradox of local equivalence” that leads actors to search for nonlocal solutions. Our causal logic provides a new way of understanding the phenomena of nonlocal search; complements explanations of nonlocal search founded on myopia in organizational learning; and shows how the micro-foundations of existing search models can be adapted to better explain organizational learning. In doing so, this study contributes to recent efforts to improve behavioral explanations of search and learning by bringing the notion of intraorganizational conflict back to center stage in this important area of organizational theory.