In the JCR app, the "publish recursive" action is only available when a node contains its same nodetype as a subnode. Publish recursive will not be available with a node that contains only subnodes of different types. At least one subnode has to be the parent node's type in order for the action to become available.

1 - open the JCR app
2 - create some node with any type
3 - create a subnode of a different type. you can repeat this "n" times
you will see that "publish recursive" is not available
4 - create a subnode that is the same type as the parent node
now the "publish recursive" action is available.