  The polarization observables in phi meson photoproduction is studied to probe
the strangeness content of the nucleon. In addition to the dominant diffractive
production and the one-pion-exchange process, we take into account the direct
knockout mechanism that arises from the possible hidden strangeness content of
the nucleon. We find that some double polarization observables are very
sensitive to the strangeness content of the proton because of the different
spin structures of the amplitudes associated with different mechanisms. This
suggests that such measurements could be very useful in probing the strangeness
content in the proton. The orbitally excited quark-cluster configurations in
the proton are included in the calculation and found to have little effect.
