Nonprofit organizations are increasingly using commercial practises and commercial approaches to practise as a means of coping with what are perceived as inadequate financial resources, excessive service demands and the need for greater legitimacy. While there has been a great deal of rhetoric about nonprofit organizations undertaking commercial activities, there has been little systematic examination of this phenomenon in the research literature. There has been even less examination of the effects of commercial activities in a nonprofit context.This dissertation seeks to better understand the effects of commercial activities on nonprofit organization by providing an in-depth account on one nonprofit organizations experience with commercial activities and by examining this experience in the context of both nonprofit management and configuration theory literatures. The latter body of literature was included as a means to theoretically approach the clusters of traits that are commonly used to characterize both nonprofit and commercial. A social service organization (pseudonym Community Service Organization) was chosen for this study. Given the exploratory nature of this research, a qualitative case study method was used with long interviews as the primary data collection technique. Research informants included all front line staff and managers of the organization.The case study portrayed an organization radically decentralized at the program level with executive leadership as the most notable organization-level phenomenon. Two important analytical themes were found, based on the disaggregation of commercial activities into distinct business-like goals and business-like processes in the case study. The former, which was demonstrated to be consonant with the understanding of commercial activities from the academic literature, was shown to be both only a minor influence in the case study site and also significantly constrained by the nonprofit character of that site. The latter theme, which focused on organizing processes as manifest through program service delivery models, was shown to be both a novel understanding of commercial activities and a fundamental and transformative influence in the organization.The theoretical significance of the two commercial activity modalities is discussed. Principal theoretical contributions are proposed to include the problematization of nonprofit and commercial theoretical constructs; the framing and specification of a novel meaning of commercial activity; the illustration of important effects on a nonprofit organization by commercial activities when the latter is understood in terms of business-like processes; and the documentation of organizational configurations at the sub-organizational (rather than organizational) level, based on processes (rather than structures) and organized through social construction and the management of meaning.