The Digital Pulse of Corporate Social Responsibility: A Social Network Analysis of Iranian Startups’ CSR Communication on LinkedIn

Afkhami, Mohammad; Bahar, Mehri; Aghamohamadi, Maryam

doi:10.22059/jcss.2026.417663.1257

The Digital Pulse of Corporate Social Responsibility: A Social Network Analysis of Iranian Startups’ CSR Communication on LinkedIn

Articles in Press

Document Type : Original article

Authors

Mohammad Afkhami ¹

Mehri Bahar ²

Maryam Aghamohamadi ²

¹ Department of Communication, Faculty of Communication, Allame Tabataba'i Univeristy, Tehran, Iran.

² Department of Communication, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.

10.22059/jcss.2026.417663.1257

Abstract

Background: Corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication on professional platforms is shaped by organizational claims and the visible actions of professional audiences.
Aims: The study proposes reputational grammar as a four-part analytic framework for examining how CSR claims become recognizable within a professional platform.
Methodology: This study examines 76 purposively selected CSR-related LinkedIn posts associated with Iran’s startup ecosystem and a directed engagement network comprising 5,525 accounts and 5,928 unique account-to-author ties. Reflexive thematic analysis identified four recurrent communicative dimensions: responsibility claims, identity positioning, evidentiary cues, and network uptake. Their configuration is conceptualized as reputational grammar, a middle-range framework describing how CSR claims become intelligible and assessable in a professional feed. Likes, comments, reposts, and follower counts are reported separately, without a composite engagement or influence score. Because the graph was seeded from posts selected for comparatively high engagement, focal-author prominence, density, and diameter are interpreted only as properties of the constructed network.
Findings: Communicative forms and observable relations within a visibility-conditioned case set, not the prevalence of CSR themes, population-level brokerage, stakeholder agreement, or substantive CSR performance.
Conclusion: The study contributes a context-sensitive account of digital CSR communication and specifies how platformed visibility can participate in legitimacy work without constituting evidence of legitimacy.

Keywords

corporate social responsibility

reflexive thematic analysis

social network analysis

startups

Subjects

business & economics

Main Object: Business & Economics, Communication, SNA

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