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Manufacturing companies can competitively be recognized among the most advanced and influential companies in the world by successfully implementing Quality 4.0. However, its successful implementation poses one of the most relevant challenges to the Industry 4.0. According to recent surveys, 80%–87% of data science projects never make it to production. Regardless of the low deployment success rate, more than 75% of investors are maintaining or increasing their investments in artificial intelligence (AI). To help quality decision-makers improve the current situation, this paper aims to review Process Monitoring for Quality (PMQ), a Quality 4.0 initiative, along with its practical and managerial implications. Furthermore, a real case study is presented to demonstrate its application.

The proposed Quality 4.0 initiative improves conventional quality control methods by monitoring a process and detecting defective items in real time. Defect detection is formulated as a binary classification problem. Using the same path of Six Sigma define, measure, analyze, improve, control, Quality 4.0-based innovation is guided by Identify, Acsensorize, Discover, Learn, Predict, Redesign and Relearn (IADLPR²) – an ad hoc seven-step problem-solving approach.

The IADLPR² approach has the ability to identify and solve engineering intractable problems using AI. This is especially intriguing because numerous quality-driven manufacturing decision-makers consistently cite difficulties in developing a business vision for this technology.

From the proposed method, quality-driven decision-makers will learn how to launch a Quality 4.0 initiative, while quality-driven engineers will learn how to systematically solve intractable problems through AI.

An anthology of the own projects enables the presentation of a comprehensive Quality 4.0 initiative and reports the approach’s first case study IADLPR². Each of the steps is used to solve a real General Motors’ case study.

Reservation of travel and leisure services through the digital environment has gained a growing role in society, influencing the revolution of the sector. It needs to be noted that there is a considerable lack of formal approaches to the identification of factors for the positive reception and use of these digital tools. For this reason, it is necessary to establish the main factors influencing the adoption and use of digital travel and restaurant platforms (TRPs), adding to the theoretical model two new factors: trust and word-of-mouth (WOM). This paper aims to discuss the aforementioned ideas.

A theoretical model has been proposed, based on the extended unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT2). Data collection was conducted through an online survey, in which 331 responses were compiled. Data obtained were analysed using structural equation modelling (SEM) with AMOS v27 software.

The results show that performance expectancy and WOM have a significant impact on the adoption of TRPs. However, it was found that effort expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions, trust and price/value are not significant variables.

This research confirms that WOM communication positively influences the use of TRPs, facilitating various aspects for restaurant customers, including reducing wait times, streamlining the ordering process for allergic and intolerant customers, enhancing loyalty programs, order management and the opportunity to provide a personalised experience.

This study is the first to incorporate WOM variable into the extended UTAUT2 model applied to TRPs. Through a literature review, it has paved the way for significant future research directions that have not been adequately addressed by the scientific community, including the adoption and usage of food delivery platforms and online review platforms, as well as the behaviour of disabled customers towards these platforms.

COVID-19 has spread so quickly and uninterruptedly that it has put great pressure on the capacities of emerging countries, especially the Latin America area. Its impacts that will have on businesses and entrepreneurs, it can be inferred that the duration of this crisis is still uncertain; thus, the aim on this chapter is to aggregate the current knowledge on how COVID-19 has impacted the entrepreneurship, and their expectations in the short and medium term. We examined 37 articles published between 2020 and 2021. To develop the discussion, we conducted descriptive review including year, affiliation of the first author, type of study, research methods in reviewed papers, and the origin of the empirical sample. We follow our thematic analysis within four broad categories: (1) crisis; (2) digitalization; (3) education; and (4) employment. Our results show that the call to address grand challenges, particularly relate to digitalization, public policies focused on supporting entrepreneurs and education in entrepreneurship in the Latin America context.

For Colombia, cocaine is a product that is sold for profit in the United States. Mainstream political economy, let alone the other social sciences, has little to say about the process of extraction of surplus value in the production and distribution of cocaine, in other words, how cocaine is exploited for profit. The paper argues that the conventional framework, which locates profits generated from the cocaine trade in an economic model of crime shields a much deeper reality than simply ‘money laundering’ as a ‘legal problem.’ The central argument is that the cocaine trade in general, and the cocaine economy in particular, are a vital aspect of U.S. imperialism in the Colombian economic system. The paper tackles a critical problem: the place of cocaine in the re-colonization of Colombia – defined as ‘narcocolonialism’ – and the implications of the cocaine trade generally for U.S. imperialism in this context. The paper evaluates selected literature on the Colombian cocaine trade and offers an alternative framework underpinned by a political economy analysis drawn from Marx and Lenin showing that cocaine functions as an ‘imperial commodity’ – a commodity for which there exists a lucrative market and profit-making opportunity. It is also a means of capital accumulation by what could be termed, Colombia's comprador ‘narcobourgeoisie;’ dependent on U.S. imperialism. It is hoped that by analyzing cocaine with a Marxist interpretation and political economy approach, then future developments in understanding drugs in Colombia's complex political economy may be anticipated.

This paper presents a comparative analysis of artwork produced in the context of social movements waged by Mexicans and Chicanos (U.S. inhabitants of Mexican descent) during the two decades between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s. Despite the fact that activists in these movements shared many elements of Mexican culture and history, were part of the same generation of radical social movements born in the 1960s, and experienced some significant interchange among movement participants from each side of the U.S.-Mexico border, an examination of movement art reveals significant differences in key elements of the movements’ collective identity and expression of political citizenship. Analysis of the artwork also highlights different aesthetic choices made by movement artists, particularly with regard to the deployment of formal elements associated with the “Mexican School” of art made famous by artists associated with the Mexican Revolution of the early 20th century. Variations in the representational strategies developed by movement artists reflect the distinct relationship of movement constituents in Mexico and the U.S. to each nation's prevailing regimes of accumulation and modes of regulation. The analysis is based on an examination of 374 pieces of art.

On 1 January 1929, Augusto César Sandino wrote his now famous declaration that aptly summarizes both the Sandino and the Frente Sandinista de Liberatión Nacional (FSLN, the Sandinista National Liberation Front) positions on the issue of foreign domination. He issued the statement in response to a letter from the officer commanding American forces in Nicaragua, Admiral D. F. Sellers. When Sellers suggested that Sandino's resistance would serve “no useful purpose,” Sandino replied:

This paper examines the impact that the global economy and local institutional environment had on the rise and demise of the small-scale industrialists movement in Peru. Informed by Alan Lipietz's regime theory, the author argues that as the mode of regulation changes according to major transformations in the regime of accumulation, these macrostructural factors impact social movements' strategy and collective identity. Each mode of regulation has a locus of resource allocation. The small-scale industrialists' movement reoriented its actions and redefined itself in adaptation to the locus of resource allocation, which shifted from the state to international funds. Two periods in the history of the movement are compared in order to test this argument. Under populism (1968–1975), the Peruvian state centralized the distribution of resources, organized the population in a corporate fashion, and ethnicized the language of protest and distributed resources along corporate lines. This institutional framework fostered a class movement which, ultimately centralized in two national associations, advocated an industrialization strategy based on the promotion of small-scale industry. Under delegative democracy the locus of resource allocation was dispersed among dozens of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), while human rights violations multiplied. The dispersion of resources fostered the multiplication of trade-specific, ethnic, or gender associations of small-scale industrialists. The decline of the national movement resulted from its atomization and the intensification of state repression.