Professor Nigel Caldwell's Fellowship project will focus on overhauling the reputation of logistics in the UK, to promote inclusive recruitment in the sector.
Date: 3 November 2022
London Met’s Professor Nigel Caldwell has been awarded a nine-month ‘Storytelling Fellowship’, as part of UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI’s) InterAct Network.
His project will focus on overhauling the poor reputation of logistics in the UK, where he said, it is frequently associated with “manual labour, freezing warehouses, late shifts and challengingly patriarchal environments.
“[But] Digital is changing logistics work and its workspace, we need talent in UK digital SCM and intelligent, adaptive people from all backgrounds.”
As such, he plans to use storytelling to push inclusive recruitment and especially for those with health or physical impairments who have been discouraged from considering logistics roles.
Nigel added, “I see storytelling as one way to join up the dots between digital advances and existing practice and increasingly small businesses, in a social way, where powerpoint and lectures are not right.
“I plan to use this Fellowship to explore and facilitate new avenues and collaborations in knowledge exchange and industry engagement work, making new colleagues through the process.”
The Storytelling Fellowship programme aims to harness the power of stories to learn from, and address, the human aspects of the diffusion of new technologies in industry. These human aspects include themes such as:
- Productivity
- Resilience
- Competitiveness
- Sustainability
- Levelling-up/inclusion
- Wellbeing
After participating in a digital storytelling workshop and creating their own digital story, Storytelling Fellows will act as advocates in their wider constituencies, facilitating their own workshops and gathering more digital stories that will be hosted on a dedicated online environment designed to provide actionable insights to businesses.
Nigel joined London Metropolitan University in May 2020 as a Professor in Operations and Supply Management, and the Director of the Performance with Purpose Research Centre. His research focuses on business-to-business relationships, performance and social value.
