The purpose of this qualitative study is to contribute to the scholarship on career success within the social entrepreneurship context. Based on the career accounts of eighteen social entrepreneurs in Malaysia, the study's findings provide a nuanced perspective of the Career Success Framework and explicate career success for social entrepreneurs as multifaceted across personal and social goals. The findings provide nuance to how the four broad dimensions of the Career Success Framework (material concerns, social relations, learning and pursuing one's own projects) are experienced and perceived in the social entrepreneurship context. The emergent career success framework of social entrepreneurs suggests that perceived career success is appraised with nine sub-dimensions captured within the broad dimensions of the Career Success Framework in ways that challenge taken-for-granted assumptions in careers research, while also highlighting the tensions social entrepreneurs face.

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Individuals start and join social enterprises to catalyze social impact but may not subjectively experience their work as impactful. In this article, we inductively uncover when social enterprise members question the impactfulness of their work and how they engage in sensemaking to experience their work as impactful. Exploring the experiences of members across two social enterprises with different missions, we provide insights into instances creating ambiguity of or discrepancies in impactfulness and unearth how individuals navigate these in different circumstances with two distinct sensemaking practices: internalizing and compensating. We reveal the efforts required to experience work as impactful, highlight the heterogeneity and agency in maintaining this perception, and suggest a potential dark side for members and missions of social enterprises.

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