Mapping social enterprise impact in Taiwan through a sustainability extended balanced scorecard and stakeholder triangulation

Social enterprises are expected to create multidimensional impact across economic and financial, stakeholder, internal process, learning and growth, and sustainability dimensions, yet qualitative approaches for mapping this impact remain limited, particularly in Asian contexts. This study examines how Taiwanese social enterprises articulate social impact using a Balanced Scorecard (BSC) with sustainability as a standalone fifth perspective. Using a qualitative multiple-case design, it analyzes 1,305 codeable interview segments from 33 respondents across 10 organizations, combining deductive coding, an independent reliability check, R-assisted visual analytics, and stakeholder triangulation to compare BSC impact narratives across cases, clusters, and respondent roles. Internal process (48.4%) and sustainability (48.1%) were the most frequently articulated perspectives, followed by learning and growth (46.4%), stakeholder relationships (42.1%), and economic and financial concerns (36.6%). Because all five perspectives were elicited through parallel questions, these frequencies are directly comparable but do not establish conceptual distinctiveness. The findings support the analytical usefulness of representing sustainability as a standalone BSC perspective within this sustainability-oriented sample, though moderate inter-coder agreement and modest base-rate-adjusted co-occurrence require cautious interpretation. Case and cluster comparisons show that environmental-technology and circular-economy organizations emphasized operational and sustainability narratives, nature-based and agricultural organizations foregrounded learning and growth and sustainability, and community-oriented enterprises combined food, design, inclusion, and local-development logics. Founders, employees, and external stakeholders contributed complementary but uneven accounts of impact across cases. The study contributes a sustainability-extended qualitative BSC framework and shows how visual analytics can strengthen transparency and auditability in impact assessment.