ABSTRACT
Money is one of the most ubiquitous and exceptional elements in society. From an economic point of view, it is a universal, instrumental and market-driven force that may be dened by the functions it provides. Manseld (1992) argues that money is everything that fulls the typical functions of money. Money serves as a medium of exchange, a means of storing wealth and value, a means of evaluation and a unit of measurement used to value goods or services (Begg, Fischer, & Dornbusch, 2002). Theories of money in economics are based on a model of rational behaviour and are typically concerned with the macroeconomic level of analysis. Psychological approaches to money focus on the peculiarities of human attitudes and behaviours (Lea, Tarpy, & Webley, 1987). From the psychological or anthropological point of view, money is not universal, because some of its forms are strictly reserved for special situations or unique social groups (Belk & Wallendorf, 1990). For example, Zelizer (1989) shows that some traditional communities identify gender of money: women use dierent forms of money than men. Numerous studies have documented that money serves important symbolic and aective functions and is a resource in interpersonal and intrapersonal regulation (Lea & Webley, 2006).
