We spend almost as much of our waking time at work as at home, but we should be careful not to confuse the two, argues the management consultant Alison Green in her new book, Ask a Manager. She is correct in the sense that to think of your workplace as family makes you vulnerable in more ways than one. It makes it inconvenient to ask for a raise. You are likely to put in more hours than contracted. And as you are busy trying to prove your loyalty and commitment to the company, you may no longer have the time to treat your family as family. In short, work and life becomes confusedCome, Join Our Family was the title of an academic paper by the sociologist Catherine Casey published in 1999. The phrase captured the kind of corporate culture that management gurus preached at the time. Much has happened since, and even though many companies still like to see themselves as a family, it has become more popular for companies to use the metaphor of friendship to emphasise their non-hierarchical spirit, as though the workplace is a conflict-free zone devoid of power relations.

There are many examples of these organisations, from Google, which hired a cook whose mission was to “create the illusion you were not at work but on some type of cruise and resort”, to the online retailer Zappos, which is practising a philosophy of “work-life integration” rather than work-life balance, to the sandwich chain Pret a Manger, which has made happiness part of its philosophy.

But as much as I agree with Green and others who argue that family comparisons are thinly disguised ways to extract more work out of people, I cannot help noting another trend, which is perhaps more frightening. That is the companies that openly embrace the dog-eat-dog spirit of capitalism, such as Amazon.

When thinking about the family metaphor, I am reminded of a meeting I once had with the CEO of a food company. We were supposed to debate each other on television, but he was too agreeable to quarrel with. Afterwards, he told me he had introduced a one-hour lunch break for all his employees, serving, for free, the Italian food the company sold. He was a very fatherly character, genuinely thinking of his company as a family – and, if I had the choice, I’d have him as a boss over Jeff Bezos any day.

• Carl Cederström is the author of The Happiness Fantasy