ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a theoretical and applied link among the moral mum effect, discourses of practice, and organizational moral learning. It also highlights how the absence of upward moral dissent can manifest in consequential ways in health care organizations and explains how communication theory can be applied to remedy this organizational communication phenomenon. There are two major discourses of practice within modern medicine: the biomedical and the biopsychosocial model. While the biopsychosocial model, discussed later in the chapter, has been proposed as an alternative to the biomedical model, the biomedical model remains as the dominant discourse within modern medicine. One can easily imagine future research studies that document biomedical discourses in health care worker's public justifications for their private ethical objections. The chapter then examines how authentic ethical justifications can be absent in health care organizational discourse and how private ethical concerns are subtly replaced with other concerns in the content of organizational communication.
