Reflection on Michèle Lamont’s Moral Social Closure in Veteran Transition
This essay is a theoretical reflection grounded in three sources:
Michèle Lamont’s work on symbolic boundaries and moral social closure,
Lived observation inside both military and civilian institutions.
Introduction
Discipline, when carried unexamined into civilian institutions, can become a moral lens. That lens creates moral distance, which often turns into social distance. Over time, this distance limits the accumulation and conversion of social capital that civilian opportunity depends on.
Michèle Lamont describes symbolic boundaries as the moral and cultural lines people draw to distinguish “people like us” from “people like them.” Over time, these symbolic boundaries can harden into real social boundaries that shape who collaborates, who gets trusted, and who gains access to opportunity.
Discipline as Asset, Discipline as Boundary
Many veterans enter college or civilian workplaces carrying something real and hard-earned: discipline, reliability, and a deep respect for structure. These traits kept people navigate their military career. They deserve recognition.
At the same time, through a Lamontian lens, these same traits can quietly become moral boundaries that separate veterans from the very civilian peers they need to connect with in order to build opportunity.
Veterans engage in this boundary work constantly, often without realizing it.
“I Treat This Like a Job. They Don’t Take It Seriously.”
A familiar contrast appears again and again in veteran transition narratives. Veterans arrive on campus or in new civilian roles and quickly notice that many civilians appear, from their perspective, unserious or inconsistent. People arrive late. Deadlines slide. Motivation seems optional.
From the veteran point of view, the contrast often crystallizes as:
“I treat this like a job. They don’t take it seriously.”
That distinction protects dignity. It affirms that the veteran’s way of being in the world still matters. But it also draws a symbolic line between “us” and “them,” and that line often hardens into real social separation.
Lamont documented this same mechanism among working-class men who used moral superiority to defend dignity when institutional power was weak. Veterans often reproduce a similar pattern in civilian fields where military status does not automatically translate.
Negotiability as Civilian Coordination Logic
There is a deeper mismatch underneath this: in civilian life, many things are negotiable in ways they are not in the military.
By negotiability, I mean the routine civilian practice of re-trading obligations through conversation: deadlines, coverage, scope, and priority are continuously re-specified rather than executed as given.
Deadlines move.
Roles blur.
Authority is often informal.
Obligations are shaped through conversation rather than command.
To someone trained under non-negotiable structures, this can look like disorder or lack of standards. But socially, negotiability is one of the main ways trust, reciprocity, and inclusion are produced. It is how people signal flexibility, mutual recognition, and willingness to share power.
Reading negotiability as moral weakness rather than as a coordination logic quietly cuts veterans off from the relational economy where most civilian opportunity circulates.
From Moral Distance to Social Distance
Over time, moral distance frequently becomes social distance.
When veterans interpret negotiability as moral failure, they are more likely to minimize optional contact points (clubs, study groups, informal projects), which reduces weak-tie formation.
For many, college becomes less a space for holistic growth and more a tool for credentialing—valuable for what it unlocks, but not for the social world it contains.
This is often not a failure of effort, but a failure of relational accumulation. In civilian fields, opportunity frequently travels through weak ties, informal collaboration, and repeated low-stakes contact.
Lamont’s insight applies directly here: symbolic boundaries become social boundaries when they begin to organize patterns of interaction. What starts as an internal moral distinction becomes an external structure of non-belonging.
When Moral Duty Follows You Into PTO
This moral logic often extends far beyond classrooms and workplaces. I still catch myself asking for “permission” to take PTO, even in organizations where time off is explicitly encouraged.
Sometimes that impulse can be attributed to toxic team or company culture that subtly disincentivizes rest. But often, in my case, it feels deeper.
There is an internalized sense that taking time off is doing the team wrong, that stepping away is somehow morally suspect. In the military, absence is never neutral. Someone else absorbs your workload. The unit carries your loss. Over time, that reality becomes a moral orientation: my presence is owed.
When that moral obligation migrates unchanged into civilian organizations built on substitution, redundancy, and negotiated coverage, it produces guilt where none is structurally required. What looks like loyalty from the outside is often, internally, fear of moral failure.
This is another form of boundary misalignment between moral economies.
The Naturalization of Leadership and Discipline
Veterans are often encouraged to emphasize leadership and discipline because of the pressure to become relevant and legible in the private sector. These traits translate cleanly into corporate language. They are marketable. They signal immediate utility to employers who often struggle to interpret military experience beyond these abstractions.
In that sense, highlighting leadership and discipline is not vanity. It is a strategy of recognition in an unfamiliar labor market.
The risk emerges when this strategic self-presentation becomes internalized as identity. Leadership shifts from something one practices to something one is. Discipline shifts from a calibrated tool to a moral lens. What began as translation hardens into essence.
Once internalized, these traits reorganize perception. Others begin to be seen primarily through this narrow register: disciplined or undisciplined, serious or unserious, competent or careless. Civilian peers are not simply different. They become morally ranked.
At that point, relevance-seeking in the labor market turns into moral filtration in everyday life. What started as a practical attempt to be recognized becomes a framework for deciding who is worthy of collaboration, trust, and proximity.
Lamont’s work reminds us that moral boundaries rarely stay in their original domain. They travel. A classification system built to secure dignity in one field quietly migrates into others, where it produces exclusion that feels principled rather than strategic.
Sweeping Generalizations and the Civilian World
What deepens this separation is how easily moral distinctions become sweeping generalizations:
“Civilians lack discipline.”
“They don’t take things seriously.”
“They wouldn’t survive in the real world.”
These statements feel intuitive inside the veteran moral frame, but they flatten difference and obscure how civilian institutions actually function. A late meeting, for example, is not always a sign of irresponsibility. In civilian contexts it can signal flexibility, competing obligations, or a culture oriented toward accommodation rather than command.
Interpreting every deviation from military order as moral failure forecloses curiosity and collaboration before they have a chance to form.
Self-Exclusion Before External Rejection
The result is often a slow, quiet form of self-exclusion.
Veterans become isolated not because civilians reject them outright, but because moral distance turns into social distance:
Fewer collaborations
Fewer informal conversations
Fewer shared risks
Fewer chances to be seen outside the veteran role
Without those relational exposures, cultural and social capital never fully accumulate.
Later, when promised economic returns from education or career pivots fail to materialize, cynicism often follows:
“College is useless.” “Networking is fake.” “Systems are rigged.”
Sometimes these conclusions are emotionally understandable. But frequently they arrive after relational opportunities were already foreclosed.
The Strategic Shift (Without Selling Yourself)
None of this requires abandoning structure, standards, or responsibility. The shift is not moral. It is strategic.
Civilian looseness can be read as a different coordination style rather than a character flaw. Late meetings, flexible deadlines, and informal communication often signal competing obligations and negotiated priorities, not a lack of seriousness.
Staying one layer past discomfort matters. Going to one study group. Saying yes to one collaborative project. Lingering ten minutes after one meeting. These acts do not require becoming social. They require remaining present long enough for weak ties to form. Most civilian opportunity moves through weak ties.
Early on, borrowing legitimacy travels farther than insisting on distinction. Mirroring local norms just long enough to gain trust often opens more doors than standing apart in quiet protest. Distinction works better after you are already inside the relational circle.
Relationships are not extracurricular in civilian life. They are often the infrastructure through which projects, referrals, and credibility circulate.
Global judgments about “the civilian world” are best held provisionally. Early experiences are limited samples. Cynicism too early functions like a locked door you built yourself.
None of this requires becoming more like civilians. It requires allowing capital to accumulate before boundary drawing hardens. You can always tighten your standards later. It is much harder to reopen doors once you have decided who does not deserve to be behind them.
The Core Tension
Veterans seldom lack discipline.
What they often lack is permission to be socially porous without feeling morally compromised.
Moral closure can feel like integrity.
In practice, it can operate like a gate you end up guarding from the inside.
Readings
Lamont, Michèle. Money, Morals, and Manners
Lamont, Michèle. The Dignity of Working Men
Lamont & Molnár. “The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences”
