Business Groups owned by Family and Sustainability Embeddedness: Understanding the Family Sustainability Spectrum

Increased awareness about the climate emergency, social and environmental inequalities, and ecological degradation influence the adoption of sustainability by business groups worldwide, including business groups owned by family. The owning families are developing awareness and strategies to pursue ecological, social, and ethical challenges and opportunities. We argue that research at the interface of family, business groups, and corporate sustainability is important to advance our understanding of the influence that the owning family has (and their related sustainability approaches). Thus, in this chapter, we develop a conceptual framework that examines the commitment, control, and continuity of the owning family to its business group’s global corporate sustainability. We merge family business literature with corporate sustainability literature and adopt a sustainability embeddedness perspective. We argue that our proposed conceptual model on sustainability embeddedness is a useful tool when analysing how diverse degrees and forms of involvement by the owning family lead to a variety of approaches to sustainability that are distinct in the business groups owned by family.