'The most important safety device is you!' On the specific nature of high-tech work process knowledge

This paper deals with the subjective and the collective nature of knowl-edge as it may develop in high-tech work processes. It argues that high-tech work requires not only skills but also experience of thinking and re-flecting these work processes through scientific concepts. This collective quality of work process knowledge (Fischer, 2002) is termed “scientifica-tion” (Langemeyer, 2012, 2014). In addition, the experience gained by re-flecting processes in scientific concepts is seen as paramount to the quality and the safety when using the potentials of high-tech. Therefore, the paper does not aim at detecting in a positivist manner an overall societal ten-dency that automatically occurs or that would arrive at our working life without contradictions. It starts with an outline of ‘high-tech’ in working life, then explains the difference between ‘scientification’ as a matter of collectively developing work process knowledge and ‘similar-scientific’ practice as a form of practice in which workers lack a scientific compre-hension of technological processes. Last but not least, the paper presents and discusses an empirical case study of perfusion-students learning in a simulation-OT, to exemplify how a ‘similar-scientific’ activity may be the starting point for a collective development of workers knowledge and practice.