Compensatory agency under uneven globalization: Rethinking structure and agency from the Global South

While many sociological accounts continue to associate agency with autonomous individuals, a growing body of scholarship has emphasized that agency may also be relational, embedded within networks of care and interdependence. However, less attention has been paid to the structural conditions under which such forms of agency emerge and the institutional functions they perform. This article develops the concept of compensatory agency to explain how families, caregivers, and other proximate actors assume responsibilities that institutions are expected, but unable, to fulfill. Drawing on Archer’s morphogenetic approach, it argues that contemporary social change is increasingly shaped by top-down policy transfers that bypass the locally grounded, reflexive processes assumed in much sociological theory. Using family-implemented support ( peidu ) for disabled children in Chinese schools as an illustrative case, the article shows how Global North disability frameworks—grounded in rights-based models and robust welfare infrastructures—misalign with structurally constrained and familistic contexts, generating resistance and symbolic rather than transformative change. Compensatory agency captures a relational and necessity-driven form of action through which globally circulating norms are translated into everyday practice while simultaneously revealing how social systems rely upon social network to absorb implementation gaps. By linking relational forms of agency to the structural conditions that necessitate them, this article extends debates on the structure–agency relationship and offers a framework for understanding agency, welfare, and social change under asymmetrical global conditions.