What enables metals ‘being’ ‘responsible’? An exploratory study on the enabling of organizational identity claims through a new sustainability standard

Claims about resource sustainability abound in business communications. Yet, little do we know about how such claims are enabled amidst ongoing controversy of industrial and organizational benefits. Here, we propose to approach these claims through the concept of organizational sustainability identities (OSIs), which are claims serving as sustainable identifiers, and whose meanings are co-constructed by stakeholders. We assess how a new voluntary sustainability standard (VSS) of the metals industry is driven by a mission to enable an OSI for the product of its members, such as that their metal ‘is’ ‘responsible’, and how the members attain this through the structural conditions set by the new scheme. We present an exploratory case study that is based on data from a content analysis of standards texts and thematic analysis of stakeholder interviews. We find that VSS enable OSIs through a) an advanced performance rationale, b) the creation of a community of practice, c) members' perceptions of altered power relations among value chain stakeholders, and d) the facilitation of a platform to keep defining the ‘responsible metal’. We contribute to the discussions of VSS emergence and their effectiveness, for which we highlight the prolificness of the OSI concept and introduce a novel comparative method of provision type analysis to capture the developments of performance rationales.