Sportization

The sportization process involved a shift toward the competitive, regularized, rationalized, and gendered bodily exertions of achievement sport that, in turn, connected to wider changes at the level of personality, body deportment, and social interaction. This process entailed regulating violence, developing formalized sets of rules and governing bodies, and shifting body habitus. Despite the existence of European rivals in the form of German and Swedish gymnastics, and although some older folk pastimes also survived, it was male achievement sport, emerging out of the United Kingdom, that was to affect people's body habitus on a global scale. Resistance to and reinterpretations of this body culture have been evident throughout the ongoing sportization process.