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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the utility of corpus linguistics and digitised newspaper archives in management and organisational history. Design/methodology/approach The paper draws its inferences from Google NGram Viewer and five digitised historical newspaper databases – The Times of India, The Financial Times, The Economist, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal – that contain prints from the nineteenth century. Findings The paper argues that corpus linguistics or the quantitative and qualitative analysis of large-scale real-world machine-readable text can be an important method of historical research in management studies, especially for discourse analysis. It shows how this method can be fruitfully used for research in management and organisational history, using term count and cluster analysis. In particular, historical databases of digitised newspapers serve as important corpora to understand the evolution of specific words and concepts. Corpus linguistics using newspaper archives can potentially serve as a method for periodisation and triangulation in corporate, analytically structured and serial histories and also foster cross-country comparisons in the evolution of management concepts. Research limitations/implications The paper also shows the limitation of the research method and potential robustness checks while using the method. Practical implications Findings of this paper can stimulate new ways of conducting research in management history. Originality/value The paper for the first time introduces corpus linguistics as a research method in management history.