Academic inbreeding, faculty professional identity, and workforce development in China’s stratified higher education system

Against the backdrop of continued stratification in higher education and intensifying competition in faculty recruitment, how academic inbreeding shapes the academic professional identity of faculty has become an important issue for understanding academic workforce development and institutional openness. Based on survey data from faculty at 10 Chinese universities (N = 600) and semi-structured interviews with 15 faculty members, this paper examines the relationships between academic inbreeding and faculty members’ identity identification, value identification, and action orientation, and further analyzes the underlying mechanisms. The results show that single-degree inbreeding is significantly and positively associated with faculty members’ identity identification and value identification, but its relationship with action orientation is not stable. Multi-degree inbreeding does not produce stronger positive effects; instead, it exhibits clear diminishing marginal returns. The interview findings further indicate that academic inbreeding can promote identity integration through organizational familiarity, relational recognition, and psychological safety, but it may also reinforce boundary closure through close-range competition, path dependence, and performance pressure, thereby weakening its externalizing effect at the level of action. This paper contributes in three respects: it extends research on academic inbreeding from research output to the formation of academic identity; it places the issue of academic inbreeding in China within the framework of a stratified higher education system and educational development; and it proposes policy recommendations oriented toward open recruitment, mobility support, and the institutionalization of early-career faculty development.