This exploratory study identifies that more can be understood about how accountability operates within an increasingly complex non-profit environment by applying stakeholder theory to managers and their decision-making in non-profit theatre organisations (NPTOs). On the surface, this may appear to be ground already covered. Previous research has explored the challenges of achieving more holistic accountability in the face of dominant stakeholders. Approaches have been proposed to increase efficiency, effectiveness and transparency. Less is known about how individual managers respond to competing accountabilities in decision-making and what factors influence their attention to stakeholder interests. NPTOs operate in both the non-profit and cultural industries sectors and, as such, are an interesting site to investigate accountability complexity in managerial decision-making. However, NPTOs (and arts organisations generally) feature little in non-profit and social accountability research. Particular features of NPTOs amplify the challenges of a multi-stakeholder environment in discharging accountability. These include artistic mission beyond production/distribution; blended business models; policy-driven leadership rhetoric; the prevalence of interorganisational collaboration; and a significantly freelance workforce. This study argues that NPTOs are the vanguard of changes in contemporary non-profit management and their study offers new insights to problems associated withThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

Using the theory of stakeholder salience and stakeholder discourse, this article questions the effect of arts policy bodies on the way the cultural sector assigns leadership. It argues that in satisfying the demands of risk-averse public management, arts policy bodies implicitly and explicitly impose the role of sectoral leader on the heads of largest best-funded cultural organisations. As a result, opportunities for alternate forms of leadership to emerge outside organisations are restricted. It renders organisational leaders in conflicting obligations to multiple stakeholders - their funders, their organisations and their sector - and exposes implicit perceptions of value. Finally, in reinforcing existing organisational structures, imposed leadership inhibits the risk-taking and innovation these same arts policy bodies promote in their strategies. This prevents the emergence of more transgressive forms of leadership and innovative cultural production and affects the ability of artists to be perceived as leaders. Consequently, artists' sectoral and policy influence is diminished and their precarity and inequality reinforced at a structural level. While focused on subsidised theatre in the UK, this research offers wider implications for how we understand policy influence on ethical leadership behaviours in the cultural sector.

Much has been written about artists’ precarity and dependency on institutions. Precarity is a de-economisation of freelance artists and ‘asymmetry’ on which cultural economy and arts policy relies. Speculation early in 2020 was that Covid-19 drew attention to the unethicality of these relationships but what has changed? Here, pre-pandemic and rapid response research on UK freelance theatre artists are brought together to suggest that the #CultureReset has been little more than a resetting of the stage with all props and players returning to previous positions. Pre-pandemic, the separation of artists from the language, policymaking, business and decision-making of professional subsidised theatre represented an unethical rationality. Covid-19 interrupted and transformed all cultural activity with a disproportionate impact on freelance artists, particularly in performing arts. Yet during 2020 and 2021, previous value systems (the rationality of the field) were maintained. Early hopes for improved conditions diminish as institutions and governments restore previous behaviours, counter to the ‘new normal’ advocated. A global crisis could not change the ‘value problem’ of artists in the arts. Moreover, pity procured for artists during the pandemic has further infantilised and devalued them. These findings call for greater scrutiny of the ethics of arts management and policy and new more collaborative approaches to solving the value problem.

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In this article, a transdisciplinary cultural labour perspective is used to examine the evolving and spontaneous networks and grassroots collective movements of performing arts freelancers in two contexts: Belfast (Northern Ireland) and Athens (Greece) in response to the outbreak of COVID-19. With a principally methodological contribution, the article proposes that evolving cultural ecologies research should mirror the ecologies it studies by adopting more collaborative and improvisational research approaches, drawing on inclusive research methods from disability studies and decolonising approaches within anthropology to reveal deeper knowledge and offer mutual benefit. Furthermore, it proposes that artists, overlooked in cultural ecologies research to date, bring knowledge from their practice beyond lived experience of value to such inquiry. The researchers collaborated with practitioner experts, revealing insights to freelancers’ milieu; their alternate systems for inclusion, representation and radical mutual care; and their increasing vulnerability in the face of ongoing exclusion from cultural recovery strategies and wider political and policy apathy to their concerns. This raises important moral and ethical questions for how cultural ecologies research and researchers engage with practitioner knowledge and the purpose of research in rendering such groups as creative freelancers visible within research and in the implicit and explicit urban and regional recovery planning in different locales. In addition, it proposes the inter- or transdisciplinary nature of cultural ecologies research may be better served by keeping its boundaries fluid, not just in the potential strength of blending research disciplines but also in its boundaries between the formal academy and practice.