This chapter discusses the legal capacity of a company to enter contracts. We discuss how companies enter contracts through agents and the statutory assumptions that protect third parties when dealing with companies. We also discuss pre-incorporation contracts.

There are several competing policy issues in this area of law. It is important that companies can enter contracts easily and be bound by their obligations. It is also important that third parties are not prejudiced if the internal requirements of a company in terms of capacity or authority to act as the company are not complied with. Both the law of contract and the Corporations Act seek to balance these issues—sometimes in interesting ways. It is useful to keep these policy perspectives in mind when studying this area of law.

Corporate law, like all law, has a context; indeed, it has many contexts. To understand corporate law today, we need to appreciate the forces—social, political, economic, global and local— which shape that law. Modern corporations and contemporary Australian corporate law should be understood as a product of, and a compromise between, various social, economic and legal ideas and philosophies. This is the focus of the first two chapters of this book.

In this chapter, we ask the reader to temporarily postpone the quest for a more detailed explanation of the legal concepts that are introduced. We will come back to examine these concepts in detail elsewhere in the book.

This chapter explores young children’s semiosis (meaning-making) and transformations when immersed with artworks that were made by professional artists. Paintings and sculptures (static, moving and sound-making) ‘resided’ (were installed) in their classroom for two school terms. The first part of the chapter provides a brief context for how artworks as mediating tools elicited children’s meaning-making through individual and social activity and describes how the children’s communication and representation of meaning was multimodal. The second part of the chapter delves into Illustration of Practice 7.1 based on recent research, where semiosis was studied through two key processes: (1) noticing, or becoming aware of signs within artworks, based on an individual’s perceptions, knowledge and emotions; and (2) immersion into the artworks. Immersion involved mediating signs through perezhivanie (a cognitive-embodied-emotive encounter that requires working-through) and transmediating (translating meaning from one mode of expression to another). Illustration of Practice 7.1 highlights how young children’s representation and communication of meaning are socially mediated, cognitive, affective and embodied.

This chapter provides theoretical and practical examples of how children’s meaning-making is enriched through teachers’ mediation. It shifts attention away from a traditional literacy perspective to a semiotic orientation that honours young children’s symbolic communication through art, music, play and dance. Exemplars are given of how children’s sign-making practices in the arts are of equal significance, and are the precursors, to sign-making in language and literacy. Indeed, the arts are children’s ‘first literacies’ because they help children find their way into the sign systems of reading and writing. Illustration of Practice 8.1 demonstrates the notable link between playing and drawing, and how children cross between graphic, narrative and embodied modes to communicate meaning. Illustration of Practice 8.2 foregrounds art making in a Reggio-inspired preschool classroom. Concluding sections focus on the building blocks of meaning-making, with an emphasis on its co-creation and the importance of documenting and interpreting children’s creative processes and learning.

In this chapter, we explore in detail two key corporate law concepts: the separate legal status of the corporation and limited liability. We discuss limitations and inroads into these concepts, as well as how the corporation—separate from the people who invest in or run it—can be liable in tort and criminal law. This chapter builds on the themes raised in Chapter 2: the relevance of different theoretical and ideological perspectives on the corporation and its role and purpose in contemporary society. To reiterate why these questions are important:

The broad and basic purpose of examining corporate theory is to develop a framework within which we can assess the values and assumptions that either unite or divide the plethora of cases, reform proposals, legislative amendments, and practices that constitute modern corporate law. This law has not sprung up overnight. We need some way of disentangling the differing philosophical and political perspectives from which it has been constructed. Indeed, the great benefit of theoretical inquiry is to reveal the existence of these differences in the first place.

As a novice teacher, it is important for students to be aware that they are entering a profession with a set of guiding policy frameworks to inform their knowledge, practice and engagement. Chapter 1 introduced a range of data snapshots that provide insight into current Australian and global education systems in the twenty-first century. Data are increasingly used to inform policy, but policy is also shaped by many other complex and multifaceted factors operating across both local and global contexts. This chapter further examines the education landscape and looks at how policy is shaped by, and in turn shapes, our educational thinking, work, teaching practices and future research.

As discussed in earlier chapters, a company has the legal powers and capacity of an individual, in addition to any specific powers conferred by law. The two key decision-making organs that can act as the company in exercising these powers are the board of directors and the members in general meeting. The general law and Corporations Act divide the company’s powers and responsibilities between these two groups. This chapter discusses this division of powers. It also discusses how meetings of members and directors are held, and the requirements on companies to prepare and disclose key information, including financial reports.

This chapter describes how conceptual learning is mediated by interactions, the environment and a range of semiotic modes. Using a case study approach, Illustration of Practice 3.1 presents four-year-old children’s dance-play and drawing-telling as exemplars of powerful forms of meaning-making and communication. The nexus between theory and practice is illustrated through an innovative model that supports children’s creative dance improvisation and experimentation, and links to graphic and narrative modes. Children’s sophisticated levels of thinking, feeling and relating are addressed, and the role of the teacher is foregrounded with regards to supporting transformative learning outcomes for young children.

In this chapter we first look at the DP-hypothesis, the idea that nominals are DPs rather than NPs, and that NP is a complement of D. We then refine this idea, motivating a tripartite structure for the nominal, analogous to what we saw for the clause in the previous chapter. Next, we focus on the argument structure of nominals, comparing and contrasting with argument structure in the clause. Finally, we briefly describe the ways in which grammatical functions are marked in nominals, again contrasting this with the clause.

The goal of this chapter is to develop a theory of Formal Features that will capture and unify many of the generalisations we have arrived at in previous chapters and, more specifically, to develop a theory of Case, agreement and movement, showing how these three notions are intertwined. The core notion is the Agree relation.