Things at Work: How Things Contribute to Performing Work

A crucial question for organizations is what constitutes work performance. While the importance of human competence and motivation to work performance has been established, less well understood is how ‘things’ – such as algorithms, tools, instruments, and raw materials – contribute to work performance. As ‘intelligent’ and ‘agentic’ technologies become further involved in work, it is increasingly important to understand the impact of things upon work performance. Although research adopting an entanglement perspective (e.g., practice theory, sociomateriality, affordances, science and technology studies) has convincingly demonstrated things are integral to work performance, there is a need for heightened clarity on how things contribute to performing work. Informed by an ontology of things and drawing on an ethnographic study in the biotechnology industry, we propose things are constitutive of work performance in three interrelated ways: (1) by belonging to a nexus of useful things, (2) through performing interlinked roles, and (3) while co‐constituting work performance in concert with practitioners. Our theoretical and empirical account offers a more integrative and comprehensive understanding of how things are constitutive of work performance compared to the existing entanglement literature. This opens several new possibilities for enhancing work performance in organizations, which we outline in the paper.