University-workplace partnerships are strategies increasingly called for in higher education. This article reports on collaborative knowledge production between employed professional chemical engineers (registered for higher degrees) and their university-based supervisors (researchers in the field of chemical engineering). The study draws on a language of description, developed by Basil Bernstein, for understanding knowledge discourses and structures, the movement or "recontextualisation" of knowledge from one domain to another and the role of knowledge in potential and actual practice. These concepts are used to analyse the ways in which knowledge production in partnerships between academic and professional engineers was enabled or constrained. (Contains 1 table.) [Work on this article was funded by the National Research Foundation of South Africa.]