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The purpose of the paper is to define a range of entrepreneurial concepts and provide a critical review of their content in order to map the forms of the entrepreneurial actions within their teleological context.

Based on the authors' definition of teleology as the process of heading towards an end, entrepreneurship was categorized into a three‐item typology, namely subject, process and object. The latter served as a platform for the analysis, which reveals some key qualities about research in entrepreneurship.

The paper provides a categorization of entrepreneurship both at the distinction (subject, process, object) and the contextual level and the commonalities and differences among entrepreneurship's different teleological approaches are analyzed and the potential is offered for further avenues of research to emerge. Additionally, it is demonstrated that the teleological approaches represent distinct approaches to interpret diverse aspects of the entrepreneurial phenomenon and provide insights into the way in which the entrepreneurial process itself unfolds.

The paper provides an innovative categorization of entrepreneurship as subject, process and object while discussing a variety of various entrepreneurial forms through their teleological nature within each of the three categories. The paper is valuable to scholars seeking to further advance their understanding in the various fields of entrepreneurship, understand the function of the particular set of activities to be undertaken, the role of particular individuals/agents involved in the entrepreneurial process, the opportunity identification/exploitation process as well as the particular objective that each entrepreneurial form aims at fulfilling.

In this conceptual chapter we examine the impact of the institutional role of public social policy as opposed to the individual role of private social entrepreneurship on the process of social change and value creation.

We review the above fields in order to identify their common and distinctive characteristics. We also examine how each contributes to social value creation and in which way these two sources of social value creation can interact in order to maximize their positive impact.

The value of our work relies on the development analysis reveals that the intersection between social policy and social entrepreneurship constitutes one of the possible responses to the growing uncertainty in the global economy and society. In a conceptual level, the findings of our theoretical inquiry allow us to provide a framework for better understanding the nature and the possible implications of social entrepreneurial/policy activities that allows the appropriate selection of the proper actions to be made for theorists, practitioners, and policy-makers alike.

Our work contributes to existing literature by providing views on understanding how the different forms of organizational actions (public policy vs. social entrepreneurship) act toward social value creation; and by contributing to the understanding of their similarities and differences and the distinctive frameworks within which they unfold.