The management research community maintains that management scholars should conclude theoretical progress in journal articles by offering managerial prescriptions. In this way, prescriptions serve as a proxy for advancing management research forward as an applied science. The poor production of prescriptions has been explained by tribalism, which suggests that some philosophy and method approaches provide superior foundations. Do they? We examined this issue by studying publication data from a management research program. We uncover how tribalism can unexpectedly unfold as a symbiotic knowledge process generated not by one dominant but by five complementary prescriptive-based tribes. We synthesize prior theories on this emergent process into a perspective that suggests new research directions on tribalism in the applied science of management research.