Investigating Hegemony Struggles: A Transdisciplinary Research Framework in Three Steps

Abstract

This chapter develops a research framework for the study of hegemony struggles with a specific research interest in questions of strategy. It focuses first on the instruments that cultural political economy (CPE) envisages for empirical analyses of hegemony production. Second, it suggests enhancing the analytical strength of CPE empirical investigations of the making and challenging of hegemony by integrating it with a historical materialist policy analysis (HMPA). Third, it argues for merging CPE, HMPA and critical discourse analysis of practical argumentation to improve the analytical strength of CPE/HMPA when investigating strategies in the more overarching domain of struggles over hegemony. Building on this, the chapter turns to the concrete operationalization of the suggested research framework in the following study of the Italian case.