ORIGINAL PAPER Emotions and Pan-Asian Organizing in the U.S. Southwest: Analyzing Interview Discourses via Sentiment Analysis Yea-Wen Chen 1 • Masato Nakazawa 2 Published online: 10 November 2017 Ó International Society for Third-Sector Research and The Johns Hopkins University 2017 Abstract Emotion is recognized as essential in human service work. Despite a recent surge of research on emotions in organizations in the past 20 years, com- munication scholars, however, have paid inadequate attention to workplace emo- tions. Yet, one key to promoting sustainable identity-based organizing lies in crafting alignments among identity, emotion, and action. This gap motivates the current study to examine emotions across organizational positions within a pan- Asian nonprofit organization serving underserved Asians and Asian Americans. Specifically, this study mapped via sentiment analysis eight primary emotions identified by the National Research Council of Canada across three organizational positions (i.e., staff, volunteering members, and clients). The statistical analysis identified trust as the most prevalent emotion. Moreover, fear and sadness were identified as affected by organizational positions. These results demonstrate the usefulness, importance, and necessity of examining emotions in the context of identity-based organizing. Re ´sume ´ Les e ´motions sont reconnues comme e ´tant des composantes essentielles du travail en service social. Malgre ´ la hausse fulgurante des recherches sur les An earlier version of this manuscript will be presented on November 11, 2016, at the annual conference of the National Communication Association, Philadelphia, PA. & Yea-Wen Chen yea-wen.chen@sdsu.edu Masato Nakazawa mnakazawa@ad.ucsd.edu 1 School of Communication, San Diego State University, Communication 243, 5500 Campanile Drive, San Diego, CA 92182-4560, USA 2 AntiViral Research Center (AVRC), University of California, 220 Dickinson Street, Suite A, San Diego, CA 92103-8208, USA 123 Voluntas (2017) 28:2785–2806 DOI 10.1007/s11266-017-9916-3