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The question, "Does the message of the Blacksburg Manifesto fit the times that we are in now and the times that seem to be shaping up in the next decade or longer?" is addressed by epistemologically locating the Blacksburg Manifesto and by introducing the postmodern debate to the field of public administration. The well-known Blacksburg Manifesto is described as an example of high modernism, beyond the functionalist paradigm, because although the central commitment is to reason and progress, the classic forms of administrative rationality are surpassed. It is classified as high modernism because the agency perspective, as articulated in the Manifesto, calls for a dialogue that evokes reason through process in the tradition of Mary Parker Follett. The postmodern experience is described as connoting a world of immense complexity, hyperdiversity, and self-referentiality. Postmodernism requires assuming a posture toward the world that tolerates fundamental ambiguity and paradox. A postmodern perspective on the Blacksburg Manifesto is presented and the central paradox of the Manifesto is exposed.

Social theory seems to be moving toward what Charles Perrow has called the "garbage can paradigm" of deconstructionism, while at the social level, the trend seems to be toward a technicist social order of hyperrelativism. By building on the school of public administration which the article identifies as the traditionalist, the field can raise a renewed image of public administration that can serve as a protection against the potentially destructive consequences of technicism.

The interpretivist perspective is rapidly growing in acceptance and influence in the feld of organization and management. This perspective has important implications for the field of administrative ethics that have not yet been sufficiently acknowledged. Traditionally, administrative ethics appears to have assumed an objectivist epistemological and legalistic ethical perspective, and interpretivism seems to imply epistemological subjectivism and ethical relativism as alternatives. Using Jung's theory of the unconscious as a foundation, an ethical perspective is developed indicating that through the vehicle of human relationship one can find stable points of reference for moral action in the requisities of the personal development of the actors involved in the situation, and hence, this perspective avoids the trap of ethical relativism to which interpretivism is vulnerable. Lying, cheating, and stealing are used as examples and the case of the Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke is presented as an illustration of how the approach applies in organizational situations.