Reconceptualizing digital product passports: Integrating representation and performativity for sustainability transformation

Digital product passports (DPPs) are recognized as important digital artifacts to advance the circular economy and sustainability. Mostly, DPPs have been regarded as passive repositories of product data in research and policy, conceptualizing them as one-directional information transmitters that collect data of the physical product to create a faithful digital representation. This narrow perspective has only partially addressed how information collected by DPPs influence actions and decisions of users and reflects an implicit assumption that better information alone drives sustainability outcomes. Thus, our paper seeks to extend the dominant representational view by incorporating the performativity perspective which is essential for sustainability outcomes, because the mere provision of more accurate and accessible information has repeatedly been shown to be insufficient to induce behavioral change in digital sustainability contexts. Instead, sustainability outcomes depend on how digital systems become embedded in and actively shape user practices over time. We propose a two-directional conceptualization of DPPs that foregrounds the interaction between data and behavior, in which the DPP not only represents the product but also provides conditions for performative enactment across its lifecycle. In doing so, we conceptualize how representational faithfulness and performative capacity jointly enable DPPs to translate data into action and shape sustainable behaviors when enacted in practice. Based on this view, we develop a conceptualization of the transformative DPP as a representational and performative digital artifact and derive a set of theoretically informed research directions that outline avenues for future IS research in the field of digital sustainability. Specifically, the behavior-shaping, agentic nature of the DPP and its ethical and privacy implications are highlighted, offering a foundation for critically rethinking its role in enabling systemic sustainability transformation.