The Language of Altruism: Corpus-Based Conceptualization of Social Category for Management Sociology

Abstract

Management sociology poses the problem of the quantita tive 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 de bating with conceptual analysis (Sartory & Goertz, n. d.), we propose to elaborate a definition of the concep t 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 sociologi cal content analysis methods: - Direct appeal to the everyday use of the lan guage increases the objec tivity 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 de monstrate the possibilities of the method. The analysis shows features in the representation of altruism in Russian that the field of management sociology needs to address for the prepara tion of questionnaires, interview guides and transcript analysis