Reconfiguring Regimes: Socio-Technical Dynamics of Sustainable Product Customization in Industrial Manufacturing

Industrial manufacturers face growing demands for low-carbon, transparent, and auditable products, yet the digital infrastructures that govern product architectures, configuration rules, and supply-chain data are often not designed to operationalize sustainability. This paper examines sustainable product customization as a socio-technical transition unfolding inside product configurators, product lifecycle management (PLM) systems, and life cycle assessment (LCA) data pipelines. We analyse four industrial cases, circulation pumps, two offshore wind turbine plants, and a gasketed plate heat exchanger, combining interviews, internal documents, and product-level impact decomposition to build a comparative socio-technical architecture linking configuration potential, digital and organizational constraints, and realized environmental outcomes. Across cases, we find pronounced misalignments between external sustainability expectations and internal digital capabilities: variant-level impact data are fragmented, traceability is incomplete, and sustainability attributes rarely become computable rule assets at configuration time. Firms therefore rely on manual workarounds and parallel tools, limiting multi-criteria comparison, slowing the scaling of low-carbon variants, and weakening auditability across products, sites, and suppliers. These frictions generate substantial unrealized decarbonization potential and distributional asymmetries in which access to greener variants varies by market and customer segment. We propose the concept of a Digital Product Sustainability Regime to explain how sustainability becomes progressively embedded, or delayed, through data models, governance routines, and configurator logic. The paper contributes a framework for diagnosing digital bottlenecks in industrial sustainability transitions and identifying actionable pathways to align customization practice with evolving regulatory and market requirements.