Governments have been encouraging public service organizations to innovate. However, little is known about the extent of innovation in public service organizations. A private sector approach to the measurement of innovation -the literature-based innovation output indicator (LBIOI) -is applied to public service organizations to address this significant information gap. The method is described and then explored in one public service sector, English housing associations. A sample of 257 innovations is constructed and then subject to analysis. This initial testing of the LBIOI indicates that the approach can be applied across public services to create longitudinal data sets, which will enhance the communication of good practice and the use of evidence in public policy, management and research. This methodology is demonstrated to offer initial insights to public service innovation and would allow relationships to be explored notably innovation and performance, a relationship central to government's promotion of innovation.

This paper explores the control effect of a moral brand through its brand culture. The moral brand culture distinguishes itself from other brand cultures by drawing on external claims for legitimacy. In this case, the brand drew upon a strong brand community, moral narratives in society, and the participative engagement with its values by many employees. As a consequence of these multiple and often external means of brand creation, managers were able to distance themselves from the process of brand and cultural management. Indeed such distancing was required for its effective enactment. The co-creation of the moral brand and the idea of 'doing the right thing' deflected attention from the controlling effect of the brand culture.

Attitudes towards male and female managers within organizations are well documented, but how the stock market perceives their relative capabilities is less studied. Recent evidence documents a negative short‐run market reaction to the appointment of female chief executive officers and suggests that female executives are less informed than their male counterparts about future corporate performance. These results appear to dispute the stock market value of having women on corporate boards. However, such short‐run market reactions may retain a ‘gender bias’, reflecting the prevalence of negative stereotypes, where the market reacts to ‘beliefs’ rather than ‘performance’. This study tests for such bias by examining the stock market reaction to directors' trades in their own companies' shares, by measuring both the short‐run and longer‐term returns after the directors' trades. Allowing for firm and trade effects, some evidence is found that, in the longer term, markets recognize that female executives' trades are informative about future corporate performance, although initially markets underestimate these effects. This has important implications for research that has attempted to assess the value of board diversity by examining only short‐run stock market responses.

We are currently witnessing two concurrent trajectories in the field of research ethics, namely the increasingly explicit and formalised requirements of research governance and the ongoing debate around the implicit nature of ethics, which cannot be assured by these methods, and related—for some—the role that reflexivity can play in research ethics. This article seeks to address two questions. First, given the focus of these discussions is often theoretical rather than on practice, how do our colleagues engage with research ethics and what is their ethical position? Second, given reflexivity is typically focused on knowledge construction, to what extent does it influence (if at all) their ethics throughout the research process? Interviews were undertaken with senior colleagues who have established modes of research practice and ethical approaches. Drawing on understandings of reflexivity and ethics, this article explores an ethical subjectivity that was typically reflective and sometimes reflexive and was usually related to personal rather than procedural ethics. It demonstrates contrasting ethical concerns of society, participant and researcher community, and how some researchers saw their ethical obligation as focused on producing meaningful research at the expense of more traditional concerns for the research participant.