These studies were especially established at Danish universities and academies and operated in collaboration with Nordic, European and East Asian research networks.
The sociologist Norbert Elias (1939) wrote the first sociology, which placed the body and bodily practice in its centre, describing the change of table manners, shame and violence from the Middle Ages to Early Modern court society as a process of civilisation.
Historical studies about the body in industrial work (Rabinbach 1992), in transportation (Schivelbusch 1977), and in Fascist aesthetics (Theweleit 1977) as well as in the philosophy of space (Peter Sloterdijk 1998/ 2004) had their roots in this critical approach.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945) placed the body in the centre of human existence, as a way of experiencing the world, challenging the traditional body-mind dualism of René Descartes.
Based on phenomenological traditions, Michel Foucault (1975) studied the configurations of knowledge in the post-1800 society, launching the concept of modern panoptical control (→Panopticon).
While Foucault's studies focused on top-down strategies of power, Pierre Bourdieu directed his attention more towards bottom-up processes of social-bodily practice.
The Stuttgart school of Historical Behaviour Studies focused from 1971 on gestures and laughter, martial arts, sport and dance to analyze changes of society and differences between European and non-European cultures (Nitschke 1975, 1981, 1987, 1989, 2009; Henning Eichberg 1978).
This concept also entered into Russian Socialism, where fiskultura became an alternative to bourgeois sport, uniting the revolutionary fractions of the more aesthetic Proletkult and more health-oriented "hygienism" (Riordan 1977).
Later, Stalinism forced the contradictory terms under the formula "sport and body culture," a trend that continued in the Soviet bloc after 1945.
When the 1968 student movement revived Marxism, the concept of body culture—Körperkultur in West Germany, "somatic culture" in America—re-entered sports-critical discourse with new analytical dimensions.
In Denmark, a particular school of Body Culture Studies – kropskultur – developed since around 1980 in connection with the critique of sport (Korsgaard 1982; Eichberg 1998; Vestergård 2003; Nielsen 1993 and 2005).
It had its background in Danish popular gymnastics and in alternative movement practices – outdoor activities, play and game, dance, meditation.
They undertook case studies in traditional games as well as in "scenes" of new urban body cultures (Barreau/ Morne 1984; Barreau/ Jaouen 1998; Dietrich 2001 and 2002).
And in Korea, Jong Young Lee from the University of Suwon published since 2004 the International Journal of Eastern Sport & Physical Education, focusing on body culture and traditional games.
Sport, giving priority to competitive running and racing, is central among the phenomena illustrating the specifically modern velocity (Eichberg 1978, Bale 2004).
On the basis of transportation and urbanism, blitzkrieg and sports, the French architect and cultural theorist Paul Virilio (1977) launched the terms of "dromology" (i.e. science of racing) and "dromocracy" (power or dominance of velocity) to describe the knowledge and the politics of modern social acceleration.
But the concept of social time embraces many more differentiations, which can be explored by comparing time-dynamic movements of different ethnic cultures (Hall 1984).
Body cultural studies also contributed to a differentiation between what in everyday language often is confused as 'space' and 'place' whose dialectics were shown by the Chinese-American philosopher Yi-Fu Tuan (see Bale 2004).
On the other hand, the body was also used to condemn elitist and spectator sport within a mass physical culture starting this period in America, which evokes participation, inclusion, and populism.
Military exercise (→military drill) in Early Modern times was the classic field for body cultural discipline (Gaulhofer 1930; Kleinschmidt 1989).
While nineteenth century's Neo-Humanism, Classicism and Olympism assumed the ancient roots of sport, body cultural studies showed that the patterns central to modern sports – quantification, rationalisation, principle of achievement – could not be dated before the industrial culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Eichberg 1978; Guttmann 1978).
Body culture studies have cast new light on the origins and conditions of the Industrial Revolution, which in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries transformed people's everyday life in a fundamental way.
The history of sport and games in body cultural perspective showed that this practice was changing one or two generations, before the Industrial Revolution as a technological and economic transformation took place.
What had been carnival-like festivities, tournaments and popular games before, became modern sport by a new focus on results, measuring and quantifying records (Eichberg 1978; Guttmann 1978).
Studies in the history of "the human motor" and the "mortal engines" of sport showed reification (→reification (Marxism)) and technology as lines of historical dynamics (Rigauer 1969; Vigarello 1988; Rabinbach 1992; Hoberman 1992).
Sportive competition follows the logic of productivity by bodily strain and forms a ranking pyramid with elite sports placed at the top and the losers at the bottom.
In gymnastics and fitness training, the body is disciplined by subjecting it to certain rules of "scientific", social geometrical or aesthetic order (Roubal 2007).
By rhythmic repetition and formal homogenization, the individual bodies are integrated into a larger whole, which is recommended in terms of reproduction (→reproduction (economics)), as being healthy and educative.
Above this basis, people build a superstructure of institutions and ideas, organising and reflecting body culture in relation to collective actions and interests (Eichberg 1978; Dietrich 2001: 10-32; see keyword 2).
By elaborating the complex interplay between bodily practice and the superstructures of ideas and conscience, body cultures studies challenge the established history and sociology.