Hegemony
In the 19th century, hegemony came to denote the "Social or cultural predominance or ascendancy; predominance by one group within a society or milieu". Later, it could be used to mean "a group or regime which exerts undue influence within a society". Also, it could be used for the geopolitical and the cultural predominance of one country over others, from which was derived "hegemonism", as in the idea that the Great Powers meant to establish European hegemony over Asia and Africa.
Essex School of discourse analysis
Founding figures of this approach are Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, two post-Marxist political theorists, who, disillusioned with economic reductionism, tried, since the 1970s, to reinterpret Gramsci’s theory of hegemony to highlight the role of meaning and of processes of interpellation and identification in the creation of political identities and in the articulation and sedimentation of political discourses and hegemonic orders. The paradigmatic formulation of this innovative orientation and of its various conceptual innovations can be found in Laclau’s and Mouffe’s "Hegemony and Socialist Strategy", first published in 1985, as well as in many subsequent contributions of the two thinkers.