ABSTRACT
This chapter presents contingency analysis seeks to prescribe some of the conditions that will influence if not determine a critical balance—that between performance — protectionism. Since both of these will follow in the wake of growing professionalization, one need not ask: Professionalization—yes or no? Rather the key question involves: How much of which effects of professionalization? The ideal of professionalization can be associated with enhanced performance, and the argument has a potent quality. Professionalization in its idealized form reflects the development of an increasingly targeted sense of good and prudent practices, as well as of institutions for motivating and enforcing that development. The impetus of professionalization toward heightened performance will be blunted by numerous and powerful forces at the very heart of what it means to be "professional." Ironically, expansive expectations are likely to encourage a kind of professionalization that inclines more toward protectionism than performance.
