Encouraging more – and different – people to attend the arts remains a vital issue for the cultural sector. The question of who consumes culture, and why, is key to our understanding of the arts. This book examines the relationship of audience development to cultural policy and offers a ground-breaking perspective on how the practice of audience development is connected to ideas of democratic access to culture. Providing a detailed overview of arts marketing, audience development and cultural democracy, the book argues that the work of audience development has been profoundly misunderstood by the field of arts management. Drawing from a rich range of interviews with key individuals in the audience development field, the book argues for a re-conceptualisation of audience development as an ideological function of cultural policy.
Dr Steven Hadley is an academic, consultant and researcher working internationally in arts management, cultural policy and audience engagement. He is currently a Research Fellow at National University of Ireland Galway and Visiting Lecturer at Leuphana University of Lüneburg (Germany) and has held research posts at the universities of Sheffield, Bradford, and Leeds. Steven is an Associate Consultant with The Audience Agency, and sits on the Steering Committee of the Cultural Research Network (USA) and the Editorial Boards of both Cultural Trends and the European Journal of Cultural Management and Policy. He has lectured, taught and delivered training in over fifteen countries and works as a consultant for a wide range of cultural organisations. His recent published work has focussed on cultural democracy, audience engagement and hyperinstrumentalism. His book, Audience Development and Cultural Policy, is published by Palgrave MacMillan. https://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9783030629694
