This article develops a new framework that explains how academic inbreeding structures and practices produce institutional habitus and generate forms of institutional micro structures and practices at higher education institutions. In this study, we try to map the territory of institutional habitus with tracing its link to academic inbreeding practices and attempt to refine its encounters in diverse spheres of institutional life and higher education. In the first part, we review the current literature on academic inbreeding that recognizes its permeability and contested meanings through developing a connection with the concept of institutional habitus. The literature review part, first, aims to provide the overall picture of inbreeding practices in higher education institutions (HEI’s) with addressing its functional as well as cultural roles. Then, it aims to question and extend the effects of inbreeding on population through engaging in different disciplinary fields, such as biology and philosophy.In this light, the discussion on the contested meanings and functionalities of inbreeding system has blossomed under the guidance of current scholarly literature, which, meanwhile, requires careful attention to the complex and dependent linkages between discourses of functionality in inbreeding practices and forms of institutional life in academic culture within which all these scientific productivities and relational discourses are deployed. In the second part of the article, based on the concept of institutional habitus, we explicate and locate the effects of inbreeding practices within the institutional units and examine in what extent academic inbreeding produce, reproduce, and drives the practices of institutional habitus-for example in terms of cohesive institutional relations, group identity formations and practices, institutional loyalty and emotions, discourses of scientific productivity, internal pockets of research territories, and forms of institutional dispositions. In the final part, we summarize the main concerns about academic inbreeding and how it functions in higher education institutions. As these sources and discussions point out, a growing body of literature focusing on the patterns and practices of inbreeding mechanism contribute to the understanding of how diverse and relational its institutional functions.

Keywords: academic inbreeding, institutional habitus, symbolic boundaries, higher education institutions