Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci furthered Marxist thought on the concept of hegemony by proposing that dominant groups maintain power and protect common class interests, namely, wealth and ownership, through the use of cultural institutions and alliances with other members of the elite, not coercion.  Cultural institutions, such as schools, political parties and the media, create a compatible version of reality, which favors elite interests.  His theory of cultural hegemony posits that the dominant ideologies put forth by these cultural institutions are made to seem natural, or "commonsense," so that we do not even question the assumptions made.  The end result is culturally-induced acquiescence to the dominant class's social agenda.  A core hegemonic principle is the continual struggle over power.  (This parallels Hall's observation that language is at the center of "struggle(s) over meaning.") When dominant ideologies and principles are challenged, social institutions support elite interests with a goal of managing the debate and maintaining social stability.  The media support the establishment by discrediting, isolating and undercutting resisters (Gerbner, 1978), tactics which Shoemaker and Reese (1996) call "repair techniques" (p.  249).  For its part, the dominant group aggressively re-positions itself to preserve its power, one example being extensive re-organization, or the forming of new alliances.  Their response may, also, be to co-opt, or repackage popular currents or social movements, to appear in line with public thought.  Gramsci's impoverished beginnings led to the onset of his socialist political activism at university and his work as a communist organizer and journalist in the decade after leaving university (in the aftermath of World War I, when Mussolini's fascist regime began to take power).  It was during the last ten years of his life, time spent in prison under increasingly failing health, that he write his seminal, 3000 page tome now known as The Prison Notebooks, which outline, among other topics, his theory of cultural hegemony.  Hall, 1982.

from http://www.unc.edu/courses/2000fall/jomc245-001/cultural_hegemony.html (Source no longer exists)