LOST IN TRANSITION : ADVANCING COLLABORATIVE TRANSFORMATION BETWEEN THE LOGISTICS INDUSTRY AND HIGHER EDUCATION

Nikolaou, Panagiotis and Bligh, Brett (2026) LOST IN TRANSITION : ADVANCING COLLABORATIVE TRANSFORMATION BETWEEN THE LOGISTICS INDUSTRY AND HIGHER EDUCATION. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

Research on industry–university collaboration and co-production has often focused on the “skills gap”, the difference between what higher education provides and what employers expect. While scholars acknowledge the need for industry-academia collaboration, much of this discussion remains normative and dualistic, framing universities as deficient and industry as the client. Few studies have examined how structural, cultural, and historical factors sustain the industry-academia divide or how collaboration occurs in practice. Within logistics Higher Education (HE), attention has typically focused on aligning curricula with employer needs, while neglecting how evaluative systems, disciplinary hierarchies, and temporalities influence collaboration. This thesis examines the persistent misalignment between academia and industry within logistics HE. Using Activity Theory (AT) as a framework and the Change Laboratory (CL) as an interventionist methodology, it seeks to create a space for collaboration between stakeholders to explore what is required to achieve meaningful and sustainable change. Empirically, the study draws on three CL workshops and twenty-four semi-structured interviews with participants from higher education, industry, and professional organisations. In the workshops, mirror data were used to stimulate critical reflection and dialogue, enabling participants to analyse their own systems and surface tensions and contradictions, and explore possibilities for change. The semi-structured interviews were used to explore deeper insights into participants’ experiences and perspectives, particularly regarding how transformative agency began to emerge within and across their activity systems. The findings highlight that the gap is not simply a matter of mismatched expectations but rather arises from a network of systemic contradictions embedded in institutional logics. Academia’s KPI-driven evaluation culture, industry’s short-term priorities, and the weak intermediary role of professional bodies collectively serve to reproduce the divide. Through collaborative engagement, participants began to surface these contradictions, recognise their historical roots, and envision new roles, such as “pracademics” and a stronger role for Professional Organisations that could support sustainable partnerships. The research makes several contributions to the literature. First, it challenges the framing of the “skills gap” as an input-output failure (assuming that industry needs are fixed and universities simply fail to deliver), suggesting that the divide is instead shaped by relational and systemic dynamics. Secondly, it places the gap in historical context by exposing long-standing structural constraints that maintain it. Thirdly, it extends the focus on co-production beyond curriculum design to include translational practices and shared meaning-making. Finally, it demonstrates that, while dispersed stakeholders can be meaningfully convened to co-create future-oriented, practice-based approaches in logistics higher education, doing so remains a challenging process given the structural and cultural barriers involved.