Academic Empowerment with a Strategic Approach: a Situational Framework for Planning the Development of Bamiyan University, Afghanistan

The world is moving fast from the industrial economy to the knowledge economy and universities are the core of all types of knowledge activities, including knowledge generation, knowledge distribution, knowledge promotion, knowledge conversion and knowledge use. Playing such a role by universities in developing countries, requires the planning of academic development. In this direction, empowerment as a clever process and a targeted program for the development and utilization of university capacities in various dimensions and context (individual, group, and organizational) are considered as a key strategy. Accordingly, this study, in a qualitative case study, developed a framework for university empowerment. The research participants included 26 faculty members and 6 employees of the University of Bamiyan in Afghanistan and 18 proficient faculty members of Shiraz universities as the key informants who were selected by using targeted sampling method, considering the theoretical saturation. The data collection method was a semi-structured interview with participants and a study of documents that was analyzed using theme analysis method and the formation of theme network. Based on this, the Bamyan University's empowerment theme network consisted of 56 basic themes and 4 organizing themes and one inclusive theme. The result of this research shows that the development and implementation of the empowerment plan at three levels of individual, group and organizational with strategic approach provides a context of growth and development of Bamiyan University.