The phrase "as a thing in" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe the role or function of something within a specific context or framework.
Example: "The painting was appreciated as a thing in the larger narrative of art history."
Alternatives: "as an element in" or "as a component of".
I don't like nationalism as a thing in itself.
Sensor nodes with sensing and communication capabilities are widely referred as a "thing" in IoT domain in the literature.
Many of these theorists regard block as a thing in itself, a mental condition that one can be stricken with.
This meant forgetting the script and treating each scene and each shot as a thing in its own right.
"I have next to no interest in makeup as a thing in and of itself, and nothing stresses me out like Sephora's salespeople.
To speak of the thing-ness of writing is to understand it as a thing in constant motion, transported from one place or time to another, one genre or medium to another, one person or public to another.
Operationalists rejected the idea of nature as a thing-in-itself existing behind the appearances observed in experimentation.
Kant identifies the inadmissible condition as the implicit taking of matter as a thing-in-itself, which in turn leads to the mistake of taking the division of matter into parts to subsist independently of the act of dividing.
These cannot be both be true of the completed (or at least completable) sequence of divisions which would result from taking matter or substance as a thing-in-itself.[26] Now since the truth of both assertions has been shown to follow from that assumption, it must be false, that is, matter and extended substance are appearances only.
"Social" is as big a thing in video games as it is anywhere else in tech and digital media.
Not sure if it's quite as much a thing in Perth and Brisbane?
