Benjamin K. Hunnicutt

Ben Hunnicutt's major writings have concerned the history of work and leisure, and include Work Without End: Abandoning Shorter Hours for the Right to Work. The thesis raised in this book and other of his writings, namely tha tthe century-long process of work reduction ended after World War II, and that afterwards, leisure stabilized and has actually declined in recent years, has been investigated in several works published in the United States since 1987, including Juliet Schor's The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure and Jeremy Rifkin's The End of Work. Dr. Hunnicutt has also written for The Wall Street Journal and appeared in a variety of nationally broadcast television programs in the USA, including the PBS special, Running Out Of Time, discussing "the end of shorter hours," the rise of the culture (perhaps religion) of work, and the trivialization of leisure. His major scholarship continues to be the historical problems of the origin of the culture of overwork and the decline of meaningful, culture generating, leisure in modern societies. Dr. Hunnicutt has been chair of the Department of Leisure Studies and Director of the Division of Physical Education at the University of Iowa. Currently, he is co-director of the Society for the Reduction of Human Labor.