Hegemony
Etymology
From Greek hegemonia, "leadership" or "rule," from hegemon, "leader." Long a neutral term for one state leading others, it was transformed in the 1920s–30s by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who used "cultural hegemony" to explain how a ruling class secures consent by shaping norms, values, and common sense rather than by coercion alone. Today the word carries that Gramscian charge: dominance that operates through culture and assumption.
noun · /hih-JEM-uh-nee/
The dominance of one state, group, or ideology over others, held less by force than by making its leadership seem natural and unquestioned.
What it names
Why the powerful rarely have to give orders — the reigning way of doing things already feels like plain common sense to everyone inside it.
Example
The startup didn’t just win market share; it achieved a kind of hegemony, where its way of working became the default everyone else measured themselves against.
Related idea
Soft power is a resource a state wields to attract others; hegemony is the resulting condition in which its dominance goes unchallenged because it feels normal.