An example worth emulating

The only thing I really got done this week was a throwaway project of translating the abstracts of newest psychology articles into Estonian. I'm not exactly sure why I undertook doing it, perhaps to improve my academic Estonian, perhaps to find out what contemporary social psychology is dealing with. In any case I found one article whose example I consider worth emulating:

Carter, Dorothy R.; Leslie A. DeChurch; Michael T. Braun and Noshir S. Contractor 2015. Social Network Approaches to Leadership: An Integrative Conceptual Review. Journal of Applied Psychology 100(3): 597-622.

Contemporary definitions of leadership advance a view of the phenomenon as relational, situated in specific social contexts, involving patterned emergent processes, and encompassing both formal and informal influence. Paralleling these views is a growing interest in leveraging social network approaches to study leadership. Social network approaches provide a set of theories and methods with which to articulate and investigate, with greater precision and rigor, the wide variety of relational perspectives implied by contemporary leadership theories. Our goal is to advance this domain through an integrative conceptual review. We begin by answering the question of why-Why adopt a network approach to study leadership? Then, we offer a framework for organizing prior research. Our review reveals 3 areas of research, which we term: (a) leadership in networks, (b) leadership as networks, and (c) leadership in and as networks. By clarifying the conceptual underpinnings, key findings, and themes within each area, this review serves as a foundation for future inquiry that capitalizes on, and programmatically builds upon, the insights of prior work. Our final contribution is to advance an agenda for future research that harnesses the confluent ideas at the intersection of leadership in and as networks. Leadership in and as networks represents a paradigm shift in leadership research-from an emphasis on the static traits and behaviors of formal leaders whose actions are contingent upon situational constraints, toward an emphasis on the complex and patterned relational processes that interact with the embedding social context to jointly constitute leadership emergence and effectiveness.

I believe this is worth emulating because it covers much of what we need to do with phatic studies: an integrative conceptual review. We need to review contemporary definitions of phatics, and advance a view of the phenomenon as relational, situated in specific social contexts, involving patterned emergent processes, encompassing both formal and informal types of phatic communion. There is also a growing interest in leveraging social network approaches to study phatic communion (i.e. phatic technologies and phatic media culture, which study the embeddedness of phatic communion in contemporary technological society). The bulk of the core arguments is also not extraneous: it is not out of the question that an approach juxtaposing a view of phatic communion in networks (i.e. phatic communication) and phatic communion as networks (i.e. phatic labor) is possible. Likewise, there is a need for clarifying the conceptual underpinnings of phatic phenomena, the the key findings of phatic research, and the broader themes in phatic studies. I have yet to read the actual paper (I've been feeling under the weather and haven't been able to get anything worthwhile done), but skimming the article I found that it would indeed be a suitable way to approach phatics by creating a chronological table of various definitions.