CHANGING PROFESSIONAL FORMS 189Yet, prognoses of ‘possible professional futures’ anticipating an inevitable
and irreversible decline in professional power and authority are counter-
balanced by contrasting scenarios that point to the inherent flexibility, adapt-
ability, and longevity of professionalized modes of expert power and control—
even within a much more competitive and fragmented labour market for
expert services and the organizational locales in which they are provided.
What is clear, however, is that the ‘politics of expertise’ in advanced capitalist
societies is becoming increasingly complex and uncertain as to its longer-term
implications for the preservation of existing professional power structures and
jurisdictional domains. Given this highly dynamic and uncertain institutional
environment, professional forms, and identities are likely to become even
more intensely contested, fragmented, and polarized in ways that we can only
begin to appreciate at the present time.