Management sociology poses the problem of the quantitative interpretation of qualitative research. The article deals with the corpus-based method, which can be considered as one of the solution tools. Based on ‘grounded theory’ methodology (Strauss & Corbin, n. d.) and partly debating with conceptual analysis (Sartory & Goertz, n. d.), we propose to elaborate a definition of the concept using quantitative research. The authors identified useful areas of corpus linguistics in the analysis of social and management phenomena and distinguished between corpus linguistics and sociological content analysis methods: - Direct appeal to the everyday use of the language increases the objectivity of the research; - A corpus provides a large quantity of representative data; - The possibility of diachronic and synchronic comparative studies; - The method itself is not time-consuming and expensive. We chose the category ‘altruism’ as an example to demonstrate the possibilities of the method. The analysis shows features in t