Centring the audience: attitudes and behaviours in Australian arts organisations

Many arts organisations seek to increase the diversity of their audiences. Recent literature suggests that this requires organisations to interrogate and change their ways of operating. This is a fundamental shift for a sector that has long considered the goal of diversifying audiences as a problem external to the organisation. Responding to this discrepancy, this article compares attitudes and behaviours among workers in arts organisations, to identify whether staff see the need to make change and practise the behaviours required. It identifies and uses three organisational capabilities–‘dynamic capabilities’, ‘social networks’ and ‘business improvement processes’–to frame an analysis of a national survey of arts workers. Through our analysis of this survey, we find that programming is an area of organisational practice that arts organisations are least prepared to change, that artsworkers perceive the value of evaluation to the organisation as limited, and that, over all, behaviours lag behind attitudes. We conclude that there is more interest in actions to diversify audiences amongst artsworkers than are currently embedded into organisational processes, but less confidence in such actions when they encroach on artistic programming.