British higher education faces a conflict between increasing societal and governmental demands, commercialisation and decreasing institutional resources.  Innovation through strategic change in business education often occurs in the form of intra-institutional mergers into business schools against the backdrop of enhanced administrative efficiency and escalating accountability.  This dissertation explores the challenges confronting universities with a view to further informing organisational theorists, practitioners and policy makers about this dramatic change.  It is primarily concerned with investigating what academic staff in two business schools perceived to be effective or ineffective strategies and actions deriving from a management endorsed multi-level merger initiative.  It was undertaken to shed light on a perspective rarely pursued: the direct views of higher education employees on what constituted their fundamental concerns surrounding the change and how they proceeded to resolve them.  These data were analysed in a rigorous systematic way in the development of new substantive theory.  This doctoral dissertation claims significance in four main areas, namely: contextual sensitivity, research methodology, theory development and the management of academic identity.  Data from the research generated concepts that were used to develop the emergent theory of identity deconstructing. This study represents the first iteration of the substantive theory of identity deconstructing in British business schools and as such, produces a new source of empirically grounded concepts.  Findings also shed light on the management of academic identities and the implications for policy makers and practitioners in the area of higher education administrative change.