English Podcast starts at 00:00:00 Bengali Podcast starts at 00:21:04 Hindi Podcast starts at 00:36:17 Danish Podcast starts at 00:46:22 Reference Moutusy Maity, Roy, N., Majumder, D., & Chakravarty, P. (2024). Revisiting the Received Image of Machiavelli in Business Ethics Through a Close Reading of The Prince and Discourses. J Bus Ethics 191, 231–252. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-023-05481-2 Youtube Channel https://www.youtube.com/@weekendresearcher Connect over linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/mayukhpsm/ Welcome to Revise and Resubmit 🎙️✨ Some names stop being names. They become shortcuts. You say them and the room fills with an instant weather system of meaning. “Machiavelli” is one of those names. 🌩️📌 It shows up in office hallways and boardroom jokes, in quiet accusations and loud certainty, as if a single man, writing in a different century, can explain the little betrayals and big bargains of modern work. But here is the human problem with shortcuts. They save time, and they steal truth. Because leadership is rarely a clean story about angels and villains. It is more often a story about ordinary people trying to keep something from falling apart, choosing between two imperfect doors, hoping the one they open does not shut on someone else’s fingers. 🚪🤝 Today’s episode takes that familiar, shadowy image of Machiavelli and asks whether we have been staring at the silhouette and calling it the whole person. 👤🔍 We are diving into a remarkable paper: “Revisiting the Received Image of Machiavelli in Business Ethics Through a Close Reading of The Prince and Discourses” by Moutusy Maity, Nandita Roy, Doyeeta Majumder, and Prasanta Chakravarty, published in the Journal of Business Ethics, a prestigious FT50 journal. It appears in Volume 191, pages 231–252 (2024). 🏛️📚 What the authors do is quietly radical. First, they step back and watch the academic crowd. With bibliometric and network analysis across 355 articles, they show how much of management scholarship keeps returning to the same narrow corridor: the Machiavelli of cunning, manipulation, and the so-called “dark triad.” 🧠🕳️ Then they reopen a door many readers leave closed. They bring in The Discourses alongside The Prince, and suddenly the moral landscape gets wider, stranger, and more usable. Instead of treating contradictions as proof of corruption, the paper treats them as signals. As if Machiavelli is not handing you a license to be ruthless, but a set of tensions you must learn to hold. Flexibility and history. Negotiation and force. Individual will and collective stability. The authors even propose a “virtù ethics” model that reframes leadership as a practical craft, bounded by context, accountable to consequences, and attentive to participation rather than pure performance. ⚖️🛠️🌍 So before we begin, sit with this: if we stopped using “Machiavellian” as an insult and started reading it as a complicated mirror, what would it show us about our own workplaces, and the stories we tell ourselves to sleep at night? If you are enjoying these deep, humane conversations with research at the center, please subscribe to Revise and Resubmit on Spotify, and subscribe to the YouTube channel Weekend Researcher too. You can also find the show on Amazon Prime and Apple Podcast. 🔔🎧🎥📲 And sincere thanks to the authors, Moutusy Maity, Nandita Roy, Doyeeta Majumder, and Prasanta Chakravarty, and to the publisher, Springer Nature, for bringing this work to the world through the Journal of Business Ethics, an FT50-listed journal. 🙏📖✨ Curious question to carry into the episode: what if the real ethical test of leadership is not choosing the “right” side, but learning exactly when a tension must be balanced, and when it must be refused? 🤔⚖️
