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This paper investigates the extent of Total Quality Management (TQM) implementation in two California public higher education systems: the California State University (CSU) and the University of California (UC) systems. These two higher education systems include 32 statewide campuses with over half a million students and 27,000 faculty. A questionnaire was sent to all campuses in both the CSU and UC systems. Issues such as TQM implementation and the benefits and challenges of such implementation are surveyed, discussed and analyzed. This study reveals that more than half of the California public universities are implementing TQM in one form or another and the TQM implementation in the CSU system is much wider than that in the UC system. In general, the character of implementation is still limited to business‐type operations in universities, such as business finance and administrative services.

Assesses the quality management systems of the maquiladoras in the Tijuana region of Mexico. Maquiladoras are manufacturing plants set up by foreign companies in the border zone of North Mexico to produce finished goods for export. Information was gathered by survey from companies representing the Pacific Rim, Europe, the USA and Mexico, and from different manufacturing sectors. The survey addressed quality management system certification, quality data collection and analysis, total quality management (TQM) and statistical process control (SPC) implementation, teamwork, communication and training practices, as well as suppliers certification requirements. The results showed that the majority of the responding maquiladoras generally have a decent quality management system, over half indicated that they have a certified quality system, and a large percentage reported utilizing teamwork for problem solving and many SPC charts such as Pareto and control charts. The maquiladoras are creating “quality culture” in Mexico’s manufacturing systems based on the principles TQM. This could be instrumental in transforming Mexico’s manufacturing from being known as a “cheap labor” provider into becoming a global manufacturing power.

This paper aims to equip professionals and researchers in the fields of advertising, branding, public relations, marketing communications, social media analytics and marketing with a simple, effective and dynamic means of evaluating consumer behavioural sentiments and engagement through Arabic language and script, in vivo.

Using quantitative and qualitative situational linguistic analyses of Classical Arabic, found in Quranic and religious texts scripts; Modern Standard Arabic, which is commonly used in formal Arabic channels; and dialectical Arabic, which varies hugely from one Arabic country to another: this study analyses rich marketing and consumer messages (tweets) – as a basis for developing an Arabic language social media methodological tool.

Despite the popularity of Arabic language communication on social media platforms across geographies, currently, comprehensive language processing toolkits for analysing Arabic social media conversations have limitations and require further development. Furthermore, due to its unique morphology, developing text understanding capabilities specific to the Arabic language poses challenges.

This study demonstrates the application and effectiveness of the proposed methodology on a random sample of Twitter data from Arabic-speaking regions. Furthermore, as Arabic is the language of Islam, the study is of particular importance to Islamic and Muslim geographies, markets and marketing.

The findings suggest that the proposed methodology has a wider potential beyond the data set and health-care sector analysed, and therefore, can be applied to further markets, social media platforms and consumer segments.

To remedy these gaps, this study presents a new methodology and analytical approach to investigating Arabic language social media conversations, which brings together a multidisciplinary knowledge of technology, data science and marketing communications.