How Southeast Asian Family Businesses Confront Sustainability Grand Challenges Under Internationalisation Pressure

ABSTRACT Family businesses dominate economic activity across many emerging markets, yet limited process‐level understanding exists of how family‐based networks respond to sustainability grand challenges under internationalisation pressure. This study examines how Chinese diaspora family‐business‐led networks in Southeast Asia mobilise and reconfigure network capital across event episodes, and why such mobilisation sometimes supports credible coordination and legitimacy, while at other times produces rigidity, exclusion, and adverse spillovers. Using a qualitative multiple‐case design grounded in embeddedness theory, the study draws on longitudinal interview, site‐visit, and documentary data from hall‐anchored family business networks in Southeast Asia. The findings show that network capital enables more effective responses to sustainability grand challenges when societal, network, and territorial embeddedness are jointly aligned, allowing collective coordination that stabilises livelihoods, compliance, continuity, and market legitimacy under cross‐border pressures. When embeddedness is partial or misaligned, the same network capital becomes over‐embedded, reinforcing selective protection, closure, and path dependence, thereby weakening social legitimacy, external credibility, and longer‐run adaptive capacity. The study contributes by specifying the conditions under which family‐business‐led networks in developing contexts support credible and inclusive responses to sustainability grand challenges, and when these same relational mechanisms generate exclusionary and strategically costly consequences under internationalisation pressure.