How does knowledge move through organizations? A rational perspective views the organization as a sieve, culling the best knowledge from its environment, while a random model pictures the organization as a garbage can filled with preferences and solutions that are randomly matched. This paper develops a third view, a relational perspective, which describes how social relationships between knowledge messengers and knowledge receivers affect how a new piece of knowledge is evaluated. We begin with the premise that individuals possess multiple roles at work and that each of these roles involves the actor in a variety of relationships. We then identify and describe six common relational schemas that can be perceived between knowledge messengers and receivers. We label these colleagues, deviants, rivals, advisors, intruders, and enemies. We examine how these different schemas can affect how a receiver evaluates the same piece of new knowledge.