Social and labor market policies pursue normative objectives (work, employability, capabilities, etc.) and are based on specific cognitive or informational bases. Nowadays, these information and expectations very much revolve around the issue of work and employment; therefore recipients are assessed along their degree of employability, i.e. their likelihood to find a job, and they are expected to deploy all their efforts towards a quick and possibly long-lasting professional integration where paid wages will substitute cash benefits. The threefold move toward activation of beneficiaries, individualization of interventions and territorialization of the modes of governance illustrates this overall trend in contemporary social and labor market policies. However, these trends can follow a variety of patterns (or conventions of the labor market, of individual responsibility, etc.) as also illustrated by the economics of convention (EC). Hence, when analyzing social and labor market policies, it is essential to have a normative and analytical framework that allows identifying and assessing the variety of normative aims and cognitive bases that lie at their very core. We claim that the capability approach can fulfill this objective and thus qualify as a critical perspective to social and labor market policies insofar as it combines the three components of any critical social science according to Horkheimer, namely a normative, a cognitive and a political dimension. The lecture will present how these three dimensions are implemented within the CA and how this paves the way towards an original conception of social innovation.