Juan Antonio Pérez López

Juan Antonio Pérez López (1934–1996) was a Spanish business theorist. He was professor of Organizational Behavior at the IESE Business School (Spain), where he became Dean (1978–1984). He was also a visiting professor at PAD Business School of the Universidad de Piura (Peru) and IAE Business School of the Austral University (Argentina). His research and publications focus on Action Theory and its implications for Organizational Behavior. They collect and integrate economic, sociological, and ethical aspects.

After studying Actuarial Insurance at the Escuela Central Superior de Comercio of Madrid, Pérez López spent five years in Hidroeléctrica Española SA. In 1961, he began to teach at the IESE Department of Quantitative Analysis (today Department of Accounting and Control). In 1970, he received his Ph.D. (1970) in Business Administration from Harvard Business School with the thesis Organizational theory: A cybernetical approach. From there on he delved into issues like motivation, learning, rationality, etc. He died on June 2, 1996, in a car accident.

The starting point of Pérez López’s theory is the concept of learning. "By learning we mean those changes that occur within the agents as a result of the interaction itself, provided that such changes will influence the next interaction."

From this definition, Pérez López distinguishes three types of agents, which he denominates:

In an interaction between learning agents, Pérez López finds three types of results.

When invited to discuss any business decision that would affect other people, he would ask: What results will I get? What am I going to learn, both from an operational and structural point of view? What will the other person learn with the same dimensions? “When you go deep into the study of the action, you conclude that results are not only external but they have repercussions on the agent, increasing or decreasing the personal richness he has at the moment of putting it to practice. That is why, what is called the double result of the action goes farther away from the unilateralism of pragmatism. The internal result of the action is more important than its external consequences, as it modifies the subject´s capacity for the execution of ulterior actions. That peculiar feedback is absolutely absent in the mechanicist interpretation of action… Perez Lopez does not exactly elaborate a theory of isolated action, or of a single subject, but what I will call a theory of reciprocal action; that is, about the repercussions that the actions of one agent have in the actions of other agents”.

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