The socioemotional wealth view argues that management control is regarded as the objective and means for retaining a family's socioemotional wealth(SEW). However, neoinstitutional theory emphasizes that external institutional pressure would restrict families' management control on the firms. How do listed family businesses respond to the conflicts between internal needs and external pressure? This paper chooses four family businesses listed on Hong Kong stock market, namely Gome, Skyworth, Agile Property and Sun Hung Kai Properties, as our subjects, to observe the response of controlling families to six negatively exposed affairs related to family managment. It finds that affairs surely increase the institutional pressure that the controlling families bear, and the families respond to these affairs through internal excision, symbolic management and substantial concessions, based on the strength of institutional pressure, which help them to remain or strengthen the equity control over the businesses simultaneously. Hence it can conclude that in response to external institutional pressure, families always adjust their management control for buffering the conflict between keeping socioemotional wealth and external institutional pressure, to maintain fundamental family control on firms. The findings abovementioned not only solve the conflicts between these two theories as for family control and reveal the different role of family control at two levels, but also extend theoretical analysis of changes in institutional pressure by neo-institutional theory.