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  - tetyana tt on 2007-11-17
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  - tetyana tt on 2007-11-17
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  - tetyana tt on 2007-11-17

• Although expat-benefit packages can differ broadly from country to country, here's a brief outline of a "fully loaded expat package," compiled from conversations with a number of international relocation specialists:

   

  Cultural and language training. The extent of this training often depends on the destination country - in other words, an expat headed to an English-speaking environment may not receive as much assistance as one heading to Asia. "Many times [cultural and language training] is provided for the employee; to a lesser extent, to spouses and children," says  Fender.

   

  Resettlement assistance. Many firms pay for an initial house-hunting trip, the services of a moving consultant and storage and shipping of goods abroad. Some employers - like King & Spalding - even help expats sell their US residences, if need be.

   

  Immigration and visa issues. "Immigration paperwork is always part of the [standard] package," says Curtis.

   

  Family assistance. If an expat moves abroad with his or her family, the US employer often will pay for the children's schooling.

   

  Tax preparation and equalisation. Many firms pay for a tax professional to compile and file an expat's domestic and foreign-country tax returns. Tax equalisation, another common feature of most packages, ensures that an expat doesn't suffer double taxation for living abroad.

   

  Health care. Don't leave home without it. While some countries offer socialized, free health care, most firms will pay for private health care. If you're heading to a dangerous locale, make sure you also have a health plan that covers the cost of emergency evacuation, if necessary.

   

  Exchange-rate protection. This isn't a trivial matter - if you're paid in US dollars and the dollar weakens versus the local currency of the country in which you're currently living, you could sustain a huge financial hit. Don't underestimate this risk.

   

  Repatriation assistance. In all likelihood, you won't stay abroad forever. Most companies cover the costs of moving you - and all of your belongings - back to the US.

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  Culture and Cognition

   

  Richard Nisbett is Theodore M. Newcomb Distinguished Professor of social psychology and co-director of the Culture and Cognition program at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Nisbett's most recent book, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently... And Why (Free Press; 2003) contends that Asians and Westerners "have maintained very different systems of thought for thousands of years," and that these differences are scientifically measurable.

    

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  What triggered your research into cognitive differences between cultures?

   

  I have always been interested in ethnicity and culture. In 1982, I was an exchange professor at Peking University and delivered a number of lectures there on social psychology. I was really struck with this totally different understanding of the relationship between the individual and the society, and between the individual and the State. It has been different from the trend in the West over the last 2,500 years. Actually, in some way, I was lulled by that trip into thinking that there were few psychological differences between Chinese and Americans, because the Chinese had full, rich and interesting personalities, and I found they matched, or didn’t seem unusual compared to the people I knew in the West. I also found that I could gossip with my Chinese colleague about other colleagues–we completely understood one another. It led to the feeling that we were the same.

   

  

   

  So at a superficial level, they didn’t seem to be that different than Westerners?

   

  That’s right, but I didn’t really have any clear inkling of what the thinking processes might be like. There was an undergraduate at the time named Kaipingpeng and he was clearly very brilliant. He didn’t speak much English but he was interested in what I had to say and we had a couple of conversations. Many years later, after he got his PhD in Psychology at Peking University, he came to the University of Michigan to earn a post-doctoral scholarship, but then decided to stay and get another PhD at Michigan. After working together for a few months he told me that American and Chinese, Westerners and Easterners, thought in completely different ways about the world, and had completely different thinking processes. I didn’t believe him for a minute but we talked and it became clear that there were very strong and clear empirical implications of what he was saying. So we started to design experiments and basically, everything that he proposed, and everything that the East-Asian students who worked with me proposed, worked out essentially as they said. After a while, I stopped telling them that nobody thought the way they said people thought because they were always turning out to be right.

   

  Your book, The Geography of Thought, describes the different research and experiments behind trying to prove this hypothesis: Westerner and Asians not only think about different things, but they process information in different ways.

   

  The overall theory is that Westerners tend to think about things in an analytic fashion. They focus on some object and they tend to attribute the object – it can be a person or a thing – and categorize those attributes to try and figure out the rules that apply to those categories. Formal logic is actually used in thinking.

   

  Easterners, by which I mean East-Asians, think in a more holistic fashion, which means that they pay attention to a much broader array of perceptions and cognition than Westerners, and make relationships among those cognitions and perceptions. They don’t make much use of categories; they don’t make much use of the rules. There is no tradition of formal logic at all. Instead they have a dialectical tradition, which means lots of things, but one of the central things it means is instead of trying to find out which of two propositions was true, the goal is to find out what is the truth that might underlie both of those two propositions.

   

  

   

  A Western approach would typically seek out the weaknesses in an argument and use those weaknesses to crush the opposing view and strengthen your argument.

   

  That’s right. Our rhetorical tradition, our legal tradition, our scientific tradition all make explicit use of formal logic.

• Hi
  I am in Kiev almost a year because of my husband's work...
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  There is a kindergarden in this school too.

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1 more annotation...

• The benefits of receiving cross cultural training prior to a relocation are that it:

   

  . Prepares the individual/family mentally for the move,
  . Removes some of the 'unknown',
  . Increases self-awareness and cross cultural understanding,
  . Provides the opportunity for questions / anxieties to be addressed in a supportive environment,
  . Motivates and excites,
  . Reduces stress and provides coping strategies,
  . Eases the settling-in process,
  . Reduces the chances of relocation failure.

• statistic of an importancy - tetyana tt on 2007-11-04