Ruling groups hold power less by coercion than by making their view of the world appear as ordinary common sense.
Gramsci developed it in prison in the 1920s. His point was that a ruling group's success is measured by how far its worldview stops looking like a position at all and starts looking like reality.
In practice
- A regulation is described as "the sensible baseline" by everyone in the industry, and the description does most of the work of defending it.
- A company where nobody can articulate why the annual cycle exists, and everyone treats it as how business is done, has hegemony rather than policy.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Sociology & Culture
- Essay
- How societies hold together, sort people, and change