After 2008, the spectacular collapse of financial markets in the United States, Spain, Iceland, Portugal, and Greece has induced researchers to conceptualize financialization as a rapid and unsustainable increase in liquidity. In Macedonia, a small country at the periphery of the European Union, however, the spread of financial instruments and debt coincided with an increased use of in‐kind payments instead of money. Focusing on a type of non‐monetary exchanges that Macedonians call kompenzacija, the article shows how in‐kind payments are integrated to financial flows, and are crucial to the emergence of an authoritarian regime. In the Macedonian context, kompenzacija is part of an oppressive set of relations whereby companies are forced to provide monetary credit to the regime by accepting payment in goods that lose value over time. The article describes the conditions that shape financialization at the periphery of Europe, and identifies in value conversions a crucial variable for understanding the interconnection between politics and finance.

This article suggests that it is advantageous for social scientists to deliberately depart from functionalist theories seeking to explain the expansion of financial instruments and logics across social life. Rather, we identify three causes of financialization from three extant clusters of scholastic activity: an organic political economy that sees finance expanding as a product or by‐product of larger state‐ and imperial‐level political struggles, a relational sociology that sees the ways that finance expands by becoming another medium for expressing and constraining social relationships, and a cultural analysis that observes the increasing redefinition of discursive and material practices as financial. Across this larger discussion, we introduce and situate the contributions to this journal's special issue on financialization.

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This article considers how entrepreneurs' fashion themselves as founders. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Australia, we discuss whether the informal dress codes of the startup world neutralize gender differences.Our findings suggest that informal dress codes reinforce the normative positionality of men as archetypal entrepreneurial actors. They reinscribe gendered hierarchies that affect the everyday entrepreneurial experience, and extend distinctly different allowances for nonconformity and unconventionality to men and women. Founders attempt to inhabit these gendered inequalities, performing a kind of esthetic labor that mobilizes their appearances to play into as well as counter the gendered expectations of the ecosystem and extract value from their personal and professional fashioning.

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