Growing the Arab Family Business (2): Going Global

Abstract

The current investigation examines how Arab family businesses internationalize and whether the Uppsala model adequately explains foreign growth in Bahrain and the Gulf Cooperation Council. It connects internationalization theory with Arab family business theory and organizational growth. The current methodology adopts an embedded mixed-methods case design that combines three Bahraini family business cases with a descriptive construction of questionnaire evidence across four constructs: network, knowledge and learning, trust and commitment, and opportunity development. The framework is built following Jabareen’s (2009) conceptual framework analysis procedure, and its contribution is evaluated against Reay and Whetten’s (2011) criteria. The cases are interpreted alongside literature on Arab family business and organizational growth. The findings show unanimous support for network, learning, and trust mechanisms, and strong but more differentiated support for opportunity development. Quantitatively, support reaches 100 percent for network, knowledge and learning, and trust and commitment, and 77.8 percent for opportunity development. The firms internationalize incrementally, mainly through exporting and establishment-chain expansion, while filtering foreign opportunities through family governance, legitimacy, and relational trust. The integrated framework develops a context-sensitive approach that integrates the Uppsala model with the Arab family business constructs and hybrid organizational arrangements, showing that international growth is staged, relational, and legitimacy-sensitive rather than purely market-driven.