It is the paper’s aim to provide an assessment of the current organization of Chinese companies in the field of logistics by determining the status of Chinese logistics organizations. To accomplish our goal we develop a model describing institutional innovation in logistics organization of Chinese companies. Our model combines existing approaches explaining logistics organization’s development with New Institutionalism theory. We empirically test the model at a sample of 142 Chinese manufacturing companies responding to a large scale survey. We find that Chinese enterprises use the strategy of decoupling, i.e. the external perception of logistics is more sophisticated than the actual implementation in the companies suggests. Moreover we find that logistics in China is just at the turning point from a function oriented perspective to logistics as a process oriented integrated function. The change process is initiated by pressure from the institutional environment to increase the efficiency of logistics, which has been triggered by the financial crisis. This paper contributes to research in different ways: it helps understanding the impact of external events on company intern logistics organization; moreover the knowledge on the development model helps deciders to assess their own logistics organization and to deduce improvement possibilities.