A Criticism of Conventional Sociological Dualities through Analysis on Socioeconomic Structure of Startup Companies

Introduction: In the current situation, despite the various social objections and crises, most of the officials and social and economical policymakers recommend the policies that, in the past, have been frequently adopted and resulted in numerous social dissatisfactions. They still promote ideas and discourses that criticize state-owned and pseudo-state-owned companies and institutions, describing them as non-competitive and traditional/ outdated structures. These structures seem to have little economic efficiency and incapable of providing their customers with high-quality products at reasonable prices. On the other hand, most policymakers and economists argue that New technology-based environments have a great capacity to meet the demands of a wide range of tastes, due to their more rational and up to date structure. This is despite the fact that internet-based businesses, especially startups, can respond to these increasing demands, thus contributing to economic growth. According to this research, common sociological dualities like tradition/modern or rational/irrational which have made the large number of sociologist and philosophers align with the new capitalist structures, are not simply theoretical or epistemological concepts. Rather these dualities are parts of reality of capitalist society which have produced and perpetuated them. On the other hand, we can argue that the complexity of today's problems, and the subjective/objective abstraction that governs society, makes the conventional use of the sociological conceptual dualities such as rationality/irrationality, tradition/modernity inappropriate for criticizing the existing trends - the trends which have currently replaced the industry with the different forms of financial capitals such as startups, and also the political and cultural public sphere with cyberspace and social network.
Method: following  Adorno’s immanent critique method/theory, this research, using a concrete structure (i.e the structure of startup companies), shows that one-sided and non-dialectical approach towards these concepts is not suitable to comprehend/criticize the current social situation and its problems.
Finding: The results of this study indicate that these dualities are not just epistemological issues developed by sociologists and theorists to analyze social reality, but they are forming the present social order - an order which under critical/ irrational conditions including present conditions, is the mediation for a variety of regressions toward the forms of pre-modern politics and society and give rise to more complicated social and financial risks.
Results & Conclusion: startups have helped to promote the neoliberal discourse by reshaping privatization and deregulation policies, especially in the monetary sphere and the development of financial markets. This discourse has been implemented in quite diverse forms in different countries over the past few decades; but despite its uneven geographical development, it has a general tendency to contribute to social inequality and to expose most individuals and social classes to recurring financial crises.