Shaping Trust through Transparency. CSR Communication at Iris Ceramica Group.

Energy-intensive industries face intense scrutiny concerning their environmental footprint and the urgency of decarbonisation. In hard-to-abate sectors such as ceramics, sustainability reporting has shifted from a largely voluntary practice to a strategic imperative for securing legitimacy and stakeholder trust. However, the complexity of the ecological transition complicates the assessment of corporate claims. This thesis investigates the strategic construction of organisational transparency in the sustainability reports of Iris Ceramica Group, a leading player in the Italian ceramics sector. It conceptualises transparency through three interconnected dimensions—information disclosure, clarity and accuracy—and adopts a diachronic, corpus-based approach to analyse reports published between 2019 and 2024, covering the Covid-19 period and subsequent developments in sustainability reporting. Findings indicate a shift in environmental disclosure, with post-Covid reporting showing greater semantic and lexical technicalisation and a stronger focus on operational performance (e.g. energy use, emissions, water and waste). Regarding clarity, explicit clarification devices are relatively scarce and comprehensibility is sometimes modulated through selective vagueness and acronym-based technical labelling. Finally, accuracy exhibits a clear diachronic evolution, with increased use of quantitative expressions, more frequent anchoring to external standards and certification frameworks, and more explicit temporal framing distinguishing achieved results from future-oriented commitments. Overall, Iris Ceramica Group’s sustainability reporting constructs organisational transparency through a balance between disclosure, clarity and accuracy. As this is a single-case study, the results are indicative rather than generalisable, but they point to a gradual shift towards more technically grounded environmental reporting alongside persistent selectivity and controlled opacity.