The mediation literature mainly advocates, evaluates, and creates workable mediation arrangements. This ignores that the mediation event is an interpretive process embedded in various moral orders. Robert Park (1926) used the concept of moral orders to refer to the organization of sentiment and relationships and the societal processes which shape relationships. Every group affiliation generates different sentiments and values, which are central to moral orders. Moral orders impact the disputes selected for mediation. Mediation advocates view divorce, child custody, spouse abuse, and 'minor' crimes between acquaintances and relatives as suitable for mediation but not rape, armed robbery, and murder. Disputants come to mediation with the sense that society as well as the individual disputants embrace a moral order that views the dispute as suitable for mediation. The role structures of mediation present the aura of compromise, but the disputants act out of self-interest to maximize personal gains in a compromise viewed as inevitable in the dispute resolution. The contexts of mediation also shape its dynamics. Contexts consist of circumstances, which are aspects and obligations in the dispute that will not be changed by mediation; situations, which are means of addressing circumstances in ways mutually acceptable to the parties; and biography and history, which are the characteristics and perspectives of the disputants that influence their views of the dispute. 26 references.