How Matter and Discourse Come to Matter in Performance Management and Innovation

This paper shows how ‘innovation processes’ so central to a pharmaceutical company are constituted through materialities and discourses of various forms. Specifically, the paper pays attention to the way performance management technologies appear in the organization, through its conversations with researchers and biological matters. By doing this, the paper contributes theoretically to the literature on the communicative constitution of organizations (CCO) by nuancing our conceptualization of how research and innovation organizations become precarious. It also makes an empirical contribution to this literature, as the subject of performance management in innovation has not yet received any attention here. The theoretical contribution of the paper is shaped by the use of analytical perspectives originating in studies of the intersections between science and management technologies.