The aim of this research was to discover the factors that affect academic staff integration in post-merger Chinese higher education institutions, especially the cultural dimension of that integration.

The case study institution is a provincial university in China which was formed ten years ago through the amalgamation of three institutions. These institutions were located in the same city and offered similar programmes in teacher education and training. Two of them were similar in terms of academic strength and organisational age and had programmes leading to both undergraduate and postgraduate qualifications. The third was a much newer institution offering three year undergraduate non-degree programmes.

The case study consists of two parts: a pilot study based on the analyses of in-depth interviews, and the other is based on the statistical analysis of survey questionnaires. The empirical understandings generated by the pilot qualitative investigation, as well as an interpretation of the phenomena of staff integration in a framework of institutional organisation theory led to the development of hypotheses concerning the central research problem. The quantitative study of survey data was used to test these hypotheses.

The study has proved useful both within an institutional theory framework for understanding the cultural aspects of academic staff integration and through the combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods in the case study.

The results indicated that among a number of possible factors affecting academic staff integration, three have been empirically identified as vital. These are cultural compatibility between the pre-merger institutions, transparency of management and school level upgrading. It was also shown that the type of merger could exert an impact on the success of academic staff integration.

Currently, hundreds of universities and colleges in China and other countries have undergone their own merger processes. How to integrate the staff of pre-merger institutions successfully in order to achieve synergy has become a common challenge not only for the management of individual institutions,but also for entire higher education systems. The research findings may provide some useful guidelines for overcoming the challenges.