I guess I can find info about him through an academic search engine.

My introduction to Sloan came, perhaps ironically, from a visit to the Ford museum in Dearborn in 1994 - they had a good exhibit on him which covered the three areas of innovation mentioned above. Further research, around that time (mid-90s) was mainly library based and a lot of the material for the historical narrative came from Encylopedia Brittanica Micropedia articles on the history of the automobile industry. Sadly much of this material has not made it through to the current CD\DVD Britannica versions. Also, Wikipedia’s coverage is really sketchy. Just goes to show I guess that the information available online still gets nowhere near the breadth of paper-based information available in a good academic library.

As regards the reference to Massimo’s work, I was lucky enough to attend a summer school in Sweden this Summer where he was lecturing, and for course materials he released pre-view sections of his forth-coming book “Beginning of History…” which should be coming out next month (see the ad at his blog, also an article “Separating the Doing and the Deed: Capital and the Continuous Character of Enclosures”, Historical Materialism 12:2, 2004. But also including his direct contribution in the lectures and of course past work in the Commoner.

OK, hope that helps, sorry about the lack of online references for Sloan.

And from what work of De Angelis is the reference from (on new enclosures)

“There is no comparable example in any scientific domain of a similar respect for the texts and formulae produced by great scientists. Revisionism is the rule here. The process of relativizing, dissolving, and dislocating these established theories is permanent. Those who resist are constantly under attack. The ideal thing would not be to mummify them, but to leave them open to other constructs, all equally temporary, but better strengthened by such experimentation. What counts in the long run is the use one makes of a theory [emphasis in the original]”

Guattari’s final comment reminding one irresistably of Marx’s famous 11th thesis on Feuerbach - that the point is to change things.