Harro Maas is Professor in History of Economics at the Walras-Pareto Center for the History of Economic and Political Thought at the University of Lausanne. He has published extensively on economic history from the Victorian period to the present day, focusing on methodological and epistemological issues. As principal investigator of the SNSF project "Moral Accounting Matters: A history of behavioral governance, 1800-1940", he is currently interested in how ordinary accounting tools, such as daily planners, have co-produced and rationalized consumer behavior.
Virgil Wibaut-Le Pallac is an SNSF doctoral student at the University of Lausanne, working at the Walras-Pareto Center within the Institute of Political Studies. He is part of the SNSF project of Professor Harro Maas (Unil, CWP), Moral accounting matters. His research focuses on the moral uses of economic tools - graphs, accounting tables or budgets - such as the Mémorial horaire of Marc-Antoine Jullien (1775-1848), in Geneva between 1796 and 1846. Combining the approach of material history and behavioral studies with a microhistorical analysis of practices and the interaction between the individual and his environment, his problematic poses the question: how do objects allow to modify behavior?
Gabrielle Soudan is an SNSF doctoral student at the Institute of Political Studies of the University of Lausanne and a member of the Walras Pareto Center for Interdisciplinary Studies of Economic and Political Thought. In the framework of the SNSF project Moral Accounting Matters led by Professor Harro Maas, she is working on her doctoral dissertation on the moral and patriotic management of American housewives' household accounts in the Progressive Era (1890-1942). Her research is rooted in the analysis of an everyday life with multiple practices and objects, ranging from women's newspapers to account books to best-selling Home Economics Movement, which are used to train young girls and later, housewives, so that they learn to keep their household accounts in a fair and balanced way.